Falling
in order
to rise……
The destruction
of received models and forms
is necessary
in order to clear a space
for spontaneous thought to arise.

From the cathedral of our own feelings,
from the void of the blank canvas, then,
comes the space for revelation.
We are fragments
of an unattainable whole.
Meaning is always
in search of itself.
Unsuspected revelations
await us around the next corner.

The blind preacher and his old dog
are crossing
against the oncoming traffic
of honking cabs and trucks.
He carries his guitar in a beat up case
taped with white tape
so it looks like it is bandaged.

Making art in America
is about saving one’s soul.
We are broken vessels
aspiring
to a lost greatness.

Excerpt, Dime-store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell by Charles Simic

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Making art in America….  I’ve not felt more removed from “making art” than this morning, —  Monday, grey and raining.  Like the old blind preacher described by Simic, one just keeps going, especially when one doesn’t “feel” up to another mile of road.  One keeps one’s course against the rush of mechanized traffic, anonymous, robotic, likely incapable of caring.

I read more of Undoing the Demos by Wendy Brown.  Or more to the point, I dashed my mind against the precise prose describing the inexorable overthrow of a way of life that I cherish.  A silent cry of pain, is the child that is within me answering the upending of a familiar, circumscribed world to which the child is accustomed.  I put the book down for now.

Change has to come.  The nature of all things, no exception, is to change.  My reason, the forebrain “knows” that the neoliberal assault upon our democracy is a last ditch attempt of the old guard, to exert a death-grip on  their hegemony, to reduce literally everything to economic reason.  I also recognize they may well succeed.  So I shake inside.

Just yesterday I was privileged to attend a concert by the Elgin Youth Symphony Orchestra.  The experience was transcendent.  Words fail to describe the elevation I felt when enveloped by the music produced by musicians in their early to mid teens.  They are on a path to greatness.  With good fortune they will take us with them.