Artist History I have an open mind the size of a tremendous bay window overlooking a lake with four geese (above the average of their kind in magnitude). The draft gives me shivers. In the spring I often gaze out this open window overlooking a lake with four geese and all that can be seen is fog. Other times the sun emerges glaring and cruel and I must turn away before my eyes go blind. And even when I can see for miles around, past the lake with the oversized geese, the draft always makes my hair stand up like shrubs in a badly cleared field. For some having an open mind it is unfortunate and completely absurd that I would allow this to get under my skin. For the rest without parachutes it is perhaps similar to climbing the highest mountain which is not nearly high enough. For me, the truly open glissader, it becomes a tease to see the color of Hendrix’s purple or Chekov’s gray without the corresponding feeling. Royal gloom when your hair’s on end but your not sure why; a sensation without sight beleaguering the bay window with curtains and tormenting the lake and geese with swimming pools and patio furniture. Even at night when the sky hangs close, dagger pointed and drunk as a maniac, and I am bundled tightly head-to-toe, the shivers make their way through my body. It wheels around like a battleship and delivers a broadside. I become sure my nails are stronger than my eyes. Sure as rain. Sure as nature who sends me to piss in the woods. I could just shrug my shoulders petulantly but I see the embryo forming. Soon it will push through the neck of the womb and there won’t even be a gob of spit to ease the passage. In the sky, the stars hang desperate as a scream. Perhaps they too feel the shivers in their electric eyes. The revolving searchlight of my mind turns to a standstill and there, bright as a billiard ball or the skull of a leper is a meteoric flash over the rim of a lost world, a creaking world gravitating centripetally to the center of nowhere. This appears to me (and all fallen men and women) under but one reflection of the several gradations of solar light. And in this one reflection I recognize myself as a jellyfish nailed to a plank. Nailed to the plank with the last drop of juice trickling down the customary boundaries whose perimeter know only the modulations of nerve endings. My mirror self is acting up again, seeing through the illusions others have created. The world dangles by invisible strings. Traveling past the inner sanctums, through muscle, tissue, and fat to the core, the heart, the soul, the religion of the mind’s eye. Here we live in shadows of puppets. These fabulous magicians take flight in every conceivable median. No longer just in books, movies, music, TV, and the Internet but even in the remote corners where we try to hide - in the food we must eat, the air we breathe, the clothes we wear, the religion we beg for. Nothing is sacred or private, not even our thoughts. In this fog of booklearning, slag and cinders of the past come to the realization of illusions as just another illusion. The whole wide world is just a big mirror bouncing the absolute around as if it were a petty rubber ball. Looking down at the woods at night the trees are sprouting horns. Here creeps a subdued pandemonium whistling the tune of modern progress. Has it that it was this way the storm debates. One may suffer a long time without knowing it. One may go on loving a bit longer, even get married, go to work. And then one night bumps begin to emerge and you realize that you’ve been working so hard that you forget how to love. The sky no longer has stars in its mouth. Instead it is filled with urban imagery generated to be joltingly poignant and macabre compared to natural celestials. Have you ever noticed hanging in stony alleys the striped face of condemned boredom? Or seen his boots? His boots have holes you know, very real oval-shaped holes. Some say it is from dragging his feet when he walks, but I know better. The holes in the leather boots are from kicking the walls repeatedly, just trying to stir things up a bit. And he is always humming the same marching song, pausing with every downbeat to strike at the bricks with a gadflies persistence. He is the lord of electric bulbs, and microwaves, and polyester……and dreams. The night and the first half of the following day hangs heavy like a cloud before a storm. Everything is silent, waiting. The shivers come and go as always, periodic in their fugitive aspirations. The wheels are falling apart, but the revolution is still intact. I am just sitting here with four geese watching it all go round and round. Sometimes you just got to let it go, try to shrug off the pinch of society’s pliers. Other days you fight like a thousand devils to put flesh on this mass of bones and collar buttons, to take the light that has been refracted inside each of us and let it flood the keyboard of color. It becomes a menagerie of a brainpan; an idea that keeps itself alive without food or water.

Location Durham, NC - USA

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