- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Love
- Hits: 290
It is not solely the province of painters, sculptors, musicians and dancers, although public perception seems to accord it. Think of architecture - perhaps it is the addition of science - physics, engineering - that makes it suspect, but while we can appreciate a great church, building, as "art", we seldom credit the Architect as an artist. Or writers - writer, in this, instance, seems to include that element of art, implicit, but we imagine the writer and the artist differently, kindred spirits, perhaps, but - something is different...
Perhaps it is because of language, that we all are - to greater and lesser degrees - fluent in it, and so a writer then is someone who does little more than speak to paper. Not, say, like a painter, or sculptor, behind whom there may be years of formal training and apprenticeships. Everyone has tried to draw, then given up when it didn't meet their expectations. Or to dance, or sculpt, play an instrument - our failure is our acknowledgement of the craft, the labour, the talent and skill that goes into it.
We reserve the term "Artist" for those pursuits that ornament our lives, for the superflous, for that which brings us joy or sorrow but is in the end dispensible - we don't need it. Thus a cook is differentiated from a Chef, or "Culinary Artist", in that a cook merely feeds us, while a chef, properly, is meant to entertain our palates. We think of actors as artists, because the one entertain us, whereas the news anchors and weathermen are merely personages that fill the television. They are necessities, not luxuries.
This is a lie.
Art is essential. Art is the degree to which we successfully resolve harmony between our emotional, spiritual and intellectual lives. It nourishes our hearts, minds and spirits.
What about science, which to many is the opposite of Art? The laws of which are discovered? Or are they invented? Concepts build upon ideas, numbers give rise to algebra, calculus, physics, a single point to geometry, biology to evolution, and no sooner is an idea accepted than it is built upon and elaborated. Science soon begins to look as much like as fantastical a creation as any painting by Heirmonious Bosch, and we should be careful to recognize and understand that we may be "Inventing" as much as "Discovering".
And - as everyone is the creator and architect of their own existence - I the author, you the reader, and should you glance around and see another ... realize that they, too, created their existence, and the measure of artistry they achieve is determined by their ability to rise above reacting to external influences, forces, by their ability to tap into that which we all have if only we can find the luxury of solitude, quiet and our own thoughts.
The Phrase "Con Artist" refers disparagingly to someone who can make us believe in lies, an artist nonetheless, but implicitly we understand a great artist will always strive towards truth - a con artist towards deception.
We are all con-artists, we decieve ourselves that we are good at (...), that we are bad at (...) - and we build our lives upon the small lies we tell ourselves, tell our employers, tell our children, upon the lies we have been told since birth and thoughtlessly impart to others...
Undeniable artistry, in the way we shape the existence of others, our children, families, friends, communities, the beliefs we inculcate them with, the degree to which we empower them, the joy and sorrow we bring them.
If only we knew the truth.
That all of life is creation, of which we all are part.
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Love
- Hits: 289
She is an artist. A makeshift studio, filled with canvases, paint, a spattered drop sheet.
A woman falling, abstracted, thick impasto strokes.
A mural in her hallway, flowers and vines, so well drawn that she reports the bees will often fly in to try and gather necter, bumbling upon the wall...
A giant mural in her studio, portraits of all her idols, heroes, her very own "Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band".
Her style, formative, incomplete. He is envious, not necessarily of the achievement but of the process, the unobstructed flow, uncensored, only in the end does she judge it, and seldom poorly, it's always good enough and sometimes better.
She recrafts great paintings that she admires out of buttons, "The Kiss", by Klimt, others, they sell, he laughs and calls her "Buttons".
He is a writer, and unlike her finds nothing to be good enough. The words are written and stricken out and written again. Pages drafted and scratched, rewritten, typed, printed, and scratched out again, all this to - if he's lucky, arrive at a sentence. His shelves are filled with books by writers he admires, his own Parthenon, the greats, ranging from collections of folk tales, psychology, the writings of Freud, Jung, Symbolism, History, Fiction, Auto-Biographies, the distillations of millennia of thought, the small fraction that he's able to apprehend; his own shelves, bursting, he's read them all, but you can never read everything. There will always be more. An undiscovered author, poet, historian, a fresh point of view, different, and here he understands the scholars bargain with the devil, for life is short and no matter how hard or much you strive you can apprehend but the smallest portion of it.
They both accept compromises, find ways to make ends meet, pay the bills.
He is a writer, she is an artist. He, She.
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Love
- Hits: 406
In the beginning they would meet, coffee, share amongst themselves the pages of the folio. Damning Contracts to be laughed or gasped at, mocked, marveled over, translated. The rustic turns of phrase, the bargainers reward, pulled straight out of fairy tales - that every chance should favor this one - that for this his music would be played forever, for boots nightly to be filled with gold, this for power, this one for love....
A shared passion, then, for reading, the arts, and it does not hurt that she is beautiful, or that he is handsome.
Share the pages, pore over them, laugh again, read phrases aloud, find references to other famous, obscure personages that made the worst of bargains, read them while listening to Tartini, Robert Johnson, Paganini, the Devil, it seems, favored musicians. Writers, dilettantes, statesmen, scholars, magicians, Popes and various other officers of the Clergy, find and review the paintings of Haizmann, Botticelli's "Map of Hell", compare, collate, find references to the spells used to conjure the demons, the devils, the Dark Lord is busy and has no time for people that can't read directions, follow protocol, yet for all that he's appeared, unbidden, to no end of shepherds, disconsolate lovers and ruined politicians.
This is the beginning. These are the words they know, the folio of diabolical contracts laid aside now in favor of trifles, books shared, poems, passages, until finally entire books are read to each other, her voice, his voice, each made for the others ear, share tastes, and in this there is the balance of the familiar and discovery, they share certain passions, enthusiasms, and are each led a little further into the others world, devouring it as well, growing in the most pleasurable of ways.
It doesn't take long. Somewhere along the way the gallons of coffee turned into liters of wine and you woke up with your face nuzzled into her neck, that great bee-hive of hair.
And these are the days my friend, these are the days.
The long habits of solitude are broken, they twine themselves into each others lives with gifts and small presents. Tokens. A heart-shaped pendant, carved out of Unicorn Ivory, given casually with an careless description of it's value. A macramé vertebrae, some sort of familiar, a house-goblin. A painted Dutch ceramic candlestick, from the 1920's. A fine old-gold men's watch. An unedited 12 volume edition "The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova". A violin.
The gifts grow increasingly rare and preposterous, days passed in curiosity shops, antique shops, thrift shops, garage sales, finding treasures to divide amongst themselves. It would seem they'd known each other forever, so alike they are, so more they become. To go from one home to the the other is to step between two rooms in the same house, no one could tell, from the library to the studio, the kitchen to the shop, that they'd left, driven from one house to the other, one apartment to the other, the grammar of ornament was the same.
And days foreshadow nights with a shared glance, a brush upon her, a touch, this intimacy, it intoxicates, fills the head, and the nights, the nights;
...falling into his or her rumble-down-filled bed, the mattress sags and brings them together, in under covers and then above, his breath on her neck, legs spread or behind her ears, upon her knees, we know this, everyone knows this, the fervor of endless love and early mornings.
This is the beginning.
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Love
- Hits: 408
A red glass, anatomically correct Klein bottle, chambers pour into chambers, for the student of souls - the heart, endlessly feeding itself; ancient wax dummies dissected and flayed for the young anatomy student, for the occultist a variety of Grimoires, the shelves ornamented with a West African Fetish, stop here and browse.
This is a big shelf, several actually, hidden in the maze, A wide tower, a monolith, beneath it's shadow a dozen shelves, and as more again piled rag-tag on the floor. Poring through the titles he doesn't notice her. This is inconceivable, how could he not?
She is his shadow.
Paperbacks, cloth and the older books bound in leather. Rare hides of exotic and extinct animals, toads, lizards, serpents, skins that purport to be Basilisk, or dragons, gilt bindings, decorated, embossed, Fore-edged paintings on masonic themes, pyramids and all-seeing eyes, landscapes with ancient ruins and silhouettes, this one, an alchemist in his laboratory; the ink, of mummies ground into tears; the light, well enough, pull a volume down, look at it's author - Known? Obscure?
Preface, scan the first few pages, the light here, enough to read, barely, it is, after all, not a library, but if you purchase a book and return it in good condition he often remits a credit, your reading or profiting of it was cheap.
These books, you cannot find them anywhere else.
First editions, rarities, there are none of the new-age titles here, the "Healing with crystals" or "My Dinner with Bigfoot" or "My Pleiadean Adventure", this section, it is more about power - mans extending the sphere of his will into places he has yet to control; dominate, into fate, chance, divination, heaven and hell, his efforts to make sense of a perfectly orderly universe - it is, in the end, not the universe, the cosmos that has failed, it is man, and here are recorded his countless attempts at redeeming himself. And - always - in this section - he fails. Ask the proprietor. If you want redemption try the sections on philosophy or religion, here we merely attempt to remedy or mitigate our worldly situation.
He has in him a fascination with the obtuse, the obscure, "the sources", as he will later tell her, history in the first person, often far more fabulous than any fiction, read Herodotus, "The Anabasis", Speke's "The Discovery of the Source of the Nile", or Bernal Diaz's "The Conquest of New Spain", this is history, life, as told by those who were there.
But today we are discovering something different, tastes vary, after all.
Grimoires, a West African Fetish, A handmade Vou-Dou doll filled with pins. These are the ornaments upon the shelves, there are others, curios, curious, they prompt the imagination. There are Necromicons - Grimoires for Necromancers, spells for summoning, communing with the dead, There are many, many Books of Spells, Books on the Conjuring of Money, of Love, of Demons, There are Books of Sympathetic Magic, Alchemical texts that list all the chemical reactions to be had with unobtainable ingredients, Books on Poisons, Philters, Salves, all to be collected - when (Usually midnight, on a Solstice), where (beneath the light of a silvery moon, where else?), how? (with a black dog that will pull the root from the ground and die shrieking), why (well, you know), who - why, of course, you...why are you here?
***
They each browse, it's dark here, the titles, front pieces, prefaces hard to read, and it takes sometimes a few pages to make a decision. These are not cheap, but today, this evening, he desires a certain company, intelligent, curious, and so browsing, looking for that rarer cast of mind, a bridge between twinned souls out of time, a shared understanding.
This is it. We live once. Read - and in the span of a few hours you can live again.
Film does not have this, or rarely, and seldom at the same level. You watch a film. You are passive, an observer, on the sidelines.
But a book, a book demands investment. You have to imagine. These words demand an internal conjuring, an effort to put face, voice, dress to characters, to fathom their intentions, to follow their reasoning, to feel their unknowing, their joys and tribulations. Film rarely does this. Books do it as a matter of course.
Here is a book of love. This is it, a Grimoire with all the spells required, bound up in Unicorn Hide, with a Unicorn Ivory Heart inset in it's cover, sealed by the proprietor with a gob of wax to prevent casual note taking, the seals - checking one - Prometheus again - holding fast a strand of horse mane or hair. There are others, more spells, less spells, some recipes, some - a few charms, but by and large books on manners, etiquette, the social graces, how to win over the man-woman of your choosing, or, failing that, how to turn your affections to another, more worthy conquest. An entire chapter on turning sour grapes into wine.
A folio of signed contracts with the devil - illustrated, signed in blood - Signatures of Paganini, Musard, Robert Johnson, Urbain Grandier, Faust, countless others, the signatures - always different, Lucifer & Satan's own handwriting, the scrawl of their countless deputies and minions, the lesser demons on his behalf, witnessed by a retinue of disgraced judges and lawyers, the pages scorched as if each contract had been plucked from the fire and reeking still of Sulphur and brimstone.
It is, of course, impossible that the devil signs any such contracts, the contracts are themselves proof, he is a remarkably inconsistent forger, here a flourish, there a scrawl, still - this folio, that it exists, read the contracts, this one, Signed in Notre Dame Cathedral, or here again in the Hartz Mountains, on the Brocken, at the Crossroads, there are contracts deputized out to the more minor demons for the less ambitious, here a contract riddled with errors and witnessed by Titivillus, here a mendicant Friar signed his soul away to Beelzebub, Belphegor and Asmodeus for a never-emptying wine flagon and a secret passage to a nearby convent.
Reading, engrossed, who would not be, the bargains made and sealed, it is absurd, comic, fantastic, tragic, and he stands - this will be expensive - but -
... she is bumped, reading over his shoulder, discovered as it were, and she stands back at his shutting of the folio, she was reading too, and asks:
"Were you going to purchase that?..."
He nods eagerly.
He notices her. She is beautiful, and she follows him to the till. The Proprietor, he seems unsurprised, and drily notes that this, it comes in rarely, and always a contract or two thicker, and then states the price.
His sense of humor, really, is unsurpassed, but what did you expect for this? He knew it would be expensive, yet not this; and she is behind him:
"I can help. We can share it."
The deal is made, the folio wrapped in paper and tied up in string, they leave together, and only then does he think to ask her name...
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Love
- Hits: 319
Memory. The earliest thing you can remember.
Him? A small swimming pool on the balcony, filled with sand and sea water and the tiny barnacles and minnows and mussels and crabs he'd stolen from the beach, slowly dying, the ocean smell coming through the balcony door. "The Wide World of Disney", it must have been in the summer. Finding a plastic jumbo jet in his cereal. Running into the street and being run-over by a car.
Hers? He doesn't know. He should ask but will have to wait until they meet.
You don't want to start this, but - it's an exercise, fondly remembering things, go through your history, how did you get here?
Remember - your first kiss, awkward, the heart pounding, the clumsy fumbled bungling's and groping's of the first love lost, less so the second, and third...
This memory, by necessity it's patchy, you could not remember it all, it would take you as long again to relive your life. But as you came into consciousness, there is more and more to remember: Friends, schools, names, places slip; revisit them. People too often wait until they're too old to remember, the faculty, without exercise, has disappeared.
Once upon a time, not so very long ago you might commission a statue to commemorate a person or event. Or a portrait, but sitting for a portrait might take quite a while, days or even weeks, think of poor Lisa Gherardini, going to sit year after year, always the artist adding in a new detail, reworking her smile, plumping her up, another line here or there, the very paint itself craqueling before he's done. Or a gravestone, the shrouded curves of death reaching from the tomb, she's a sensual figure. Is it Persephone? Or the deceased? It might be written down, but - well, as we know, to write it down is at best to lie about it.
Memories lie, they are imprecise, we are by nature impressionable, pieces of books, short bits of film intrude upon them, embroid themselves into our brains - are we remembering something that happened to us? Or something, perhaps that was told to us? Or that we saw or read and made such an impression that we adopted as our own, made it a part of us.
We hang on to them, take out the favorites, play back in our minds cherished memories, places, people, events, or replay memories of trauma, unpleasantness, imagine our exacting of revenge, the cutting words we'll deliver at our next encounter.
By their very nature fragile, elusive, we find touchstones for memories, souvenirs of vacations, a pebble picked up here or a shell from this beach, knick-knacks and clutter bought in shops, relatable only to the person that acquired it, the next owner - should there be one, will have the memory of finding marked down at a garage sale, or pulling it off the shelf of an abandoned home.
An enameled locket, within 2 portraits, he/she, together with a twist of her hair. A rich keepsake from lovers long expired.
Technology now augments memory in ways never before possible.
First the camera - daguerreotypes, tintypes, photography, now memory could be staged and captured, affordable to almost everyone, and as it improved everyone could preserve their memories on flimsy bits of celluloid and paper.
Memory, now external.
Now we capture speech, the Edison Phonograph and cylinders. By our standards, primitive, but by those of the day a miracle. Wax cylinders, platters, records.
With every increment in technology comes the urge to falsify it. Spirit Photography - disembodied heads looking down from swathes of cotton, or perhaps standing behind the subject, hand on the sitters shoulder, faded, still dressed as they were in life, the afterlife could not provide a change of clothing.
Always they are near, closer than you think, than you should be comfortable with by far. For a while it is the rage, people lining up to be deceived, then it passes.
Photography becomes film, silent, black and white, accompanied by a pianist, Willis O'Brian's "The Lost World" or Fritz Lang's "Metropolis"; we can film now the past, the present, and use the camera as a lens into the speculative future.
Technology perfects itself, evolves, becomes color, there are vast improvements in quality and sound, always the technology gets both smaller - and better - information now now longer on records, or tape or celluloid, entirely digital, unlimited convenience, there is nothing you can't afford to document,
With this, of course, is the perfection of the photograph, of video, of audio recording, we have immediate back-up of our memories, so many backups that were it not for the technology we rely on to store it we'd lose our place, forget that we were ever there.
But - strange, the things that remind me the most of her - touchstones, of mine own, not her photograph, but a certain song we shared - or another. There were many. You go there, careful, not too often or you will wear it out, memory like the groove on a record - for memory, every time you visit, is slightly changed, altered, and the poignancy is lost.
And her smell. Her smell, nose close - This I can't remember. And - odd, I would know it if I smelt it again, have smelt it, thought I smelled it, driving through the mountains late at night, perhaps it was cued by song on the radio, or at a perfume counter - and sniffing them all until my nose is worn out, no, she is not here.