Clouds

July 30, 2007 in 1977, Coffee, Jack Kerouac, Morning, Painting, Patti Smith, art, changes, desire, frustration, oatmeal, random art, representation, self-expression, stream of consciousness, thinking, typewriter, urge to make, writing

Oatmeal, coffee, early morn. I think I think a lot. But it’s a lot of spinning gears and mental friction. Some of it seems to have leverage, gravity, and pull, but I can’t always tell right away. I know I’m gnawing on the same knotty problems in my brain for over 30 years, since high school at least. Similar desires and frustrations all the way along. Some have dropped away, others have morphed strangely. One of the conundrums of my youth, for example: I want to be a writer, I want to write, but I have nothing to say. Or more basically, an artist with nothing to represent, nothing I wanted to represent. Maybe that’s normal for modern times. Or maybe it was normal in the 70s, when I was 17.

So, with no urge to represent or to “self-express” except the original urge to MAKE ART, I kept gnawing. I think it was Patti Smith’s Babel, a book of poetry, that showed me that I could just write my stream of consciousness, just write and not worry about whether or not I was representing (which at that time seemed to be what I should be doing as a writer, but it just never worked for me). I’m not saying that’s how she wrote those poems, but they had that effect on me, a freeing effect. So did Kerouac’s prose, and others. So I started writing more freely and lots of imagry came forth. Not in any organized fashion, really, except perhaps typographical. I used my mom’s typewriter to to write poetry. I loved that already-published feeling that comes from looking at typewritten words on paper. This was way before we all wrote on screens. Back then, we all wrote on paper with pens and pencils. For school, we typed things. But I got into typing early just because I liked the feeling of typing and the look of typed words, instantly appearing on the paper.

For me, I believe, it is much more about the material, the actual matter (paper, ink, lines, or air-vibrations in time, or color/paint) rather than the “meaning.” So when I paint, I don’t paint anything but paint. When I play, I play pitch, timbre, amplitude, duration and not a faun or a lake or a woman’s face. But then again, that’s just my POV. You might see or hear or read something completely representational and meaningful in my “random” emanations. Very mysterious. Much like looking at clouds in a sky.