Author: herbeaton

Grief, the considering of grief, it is a job for some.

Changing things, from one thing to another, grief into say joy or beauty or maybe … damn this is a big maybe – into better moral actions.  Doesn’t sound reasonable does it: that’s because those are reasoned from the past, maybe a job for authority (or maybe anarchists).

There is the changing from the outer growing, reaping time; into the enclosed, restful, time: the seasonal – now.  How much trouble should one go through to transform that end-of-the-summer grief … maybe, into beauty.  Seems the job of the artist.

As it is – in the changing – gloom descends; it is the low light, cold drizzle time.  The pain is now (or else why, or what, would be transformed): now, as in – the past carried forward.  There must be something in the quiet of winter; some poetical wondering enclosed, darkened for the soul.  Would that transform enough pain if handled by some mystic?

Maybe, the past&now analyzed and checked against some catalogue of disorders for the appropriate cure; there ought to be some skilled consoler.

It seems that the pain, looking backward, is what is knowable, but, considering the new (or renewed if the past is included) moral actions; could they generate … maybe, from thankfulness.

Exploits and boys, well at least the late age of boyhood, somewhere around 12, 13, 14, …  (some would have other ages included.)

Seems like there is always a constant trial, a trial of some exploit that apparently worked back in the day (hormonally chronological).  The surrounding life has changed a bit but there hasn’t been much of a change in boys.

Exploits, counting coup  battling the other guys (tribal pushing and shoving), charging the sabertooth tiger (testosterone fantasy), stealing eggs from eagle’s eyries (petty larceny); exploits to gain the acclaim and the bragging and the bluffing rights.

Exploits once proving who is tuffest, best balanced, most capable of quickly grabbing the mouthful, or handful … ending puberty.

Exploits now deliriously digitally virtualized.

Eventually, if the exploits haven’t rewarded the boy with the babe, the vehicle, the lion’s share of the loot and repast,

the boy is left with …

just small trinkets and smirky mimicry of some tyrant’s buffoonery.

There was a day when when the boy could just run off to join the circus, to exploit fears and folly, and maybe … in the end …

exploit a bit of finese.

The river to which they went was wet, then dried, now damp again; leaving shallow pools to await freezing.

It is where galactic rules, the measured kind, are so easily dismissed by a boy – to impress the girl, so as to reflect on a puddle; or, more elegantly, a shallow pool … with romance and absurdity.

A place for swinging twigs and skipping stones, swirling and splashing time pictures, cloudy, rippling orbits (remnants of a person) –  exercising a   personality … the marks of his passing…

… that’s turbulence…

    … beginning – and to the end –   turbulence…

There, there you have it; the mystery of the whole universe ( including his special place ) … turbulence in a shallow pool.

What if…what if, the conformities (great and small) consented to excuse an absence by He & She.

Maybe, to consider… something

Maybe, uncertain

Maybe, an inelegant capture of silence

Maybe, an enigma, but … what if … a willing (if limited) participation?

Maybe, a sharing

Maybe, some happiness

Maybe, some conspiratorial  wonder.

What if … what if they just desire

Maybe, presence.

Outside on the prairie, even in the midst of agricultural industry, it is possible to think of Heaven up beyond the clouds, as someplace to fly to, someplace to go;  responding to  memory – purest memories, sounds – harmoniously resolved, faults – most grievous faults – transformed.

Sometimes when people, or plural peoples, are dying they … reconsider.  There may have been signs to consider as they wandered along, but the somber utility of life does get in the way of understanding.  Understanding, for example, music and a celestial future. Heaven may be just a long stretched out sheep pasture with wandering folks in pure white veils and angelic wings humming delirious melody and harmony, or it may be silence in a baptism of color.

In the spirit of reconsidering; what of music, the singing, presumably transforming the silence in Heaven. Is there a night club, dance hall, church, or bar and grill with actual musicians on your same plane (elevated and very divine), or is some virtual recording, (obviously repetitive – eternity is a long long time) playing only for you.

Maybe some faint hope of fame in Heaven, ( like singing in the Divinity’s shower) is worth practicing (here) to gain.

Is the heavenly-hopeful immigrant musician expected to carry speakers, amplifiers, recording devices et.al. from this present here and now into the afterlife, on his back like so much refugee detritus.

Is it absurd to think that Heaven needs a sound track? imagined here? – in the earthly realm – could it really matter? do they have sub-woofers blasting all the crap to Hell (the repository of faults)?

And does interruption, certain sounds, matter more than silence, do some acceptable interruptions maybe …  achieve the heavenly transformation?

Feminine maize, the millennia’s inheritance.

Time always matters, especially … Now.

Now the rush of spring, now summer’s wet heat, now the fruiting fullness, now the drying, now some place for her, now some ending … now … firmly above the soil, the storms passed, the harvest to come.

NOW ... an edited story:

Maybe, if we reach completion … respect.

NOW, just a gentle breeze, still warm autumnal breeze, now picture (it is easy) the cumulus gentle pillow rising full wonder, holding up Heaven ( or the heavens, if you prefer). That which lifts highest, those are storms; violent heat coursing to the top, the cool reaches of tornadic whirling wonder:  a place of immutable divine rules, a full presence, a remembrance, the cosmos or so it is called.

Now a chill, if only for an evening, a dryness to hold the virtue un-moldy, a dryness to bury, a burial to crack, the remains of a spent voluptuous youth in multiple greens, the sun-yellowed green chartreuse moist sexual veil now furry purple brown. Bulbous pillows suspended rain, then it came; invested spectral sun and mineral movement, now sugar to starch and to dry, the silks purple brown tipped dusty dry brown; dry, longer lasting than rainbows, if a bit smaller and more serviceable, finished and golden.

Now land plots, tasseled waves, the swirled breeze, the rippled dust flows over endless acres, numbered now to the smallest unit.  Now, the unsheathed grain streams – filling mundane hoppers, trucks, shiny sullen mechanical towers.

Now, a dollared industry.

Now it is seldom for beauty or poetic contemplation, now lacking the intimate wonder of that which passed forward.

Now, immortalization – the respectful pedestal, the static story – her inheritance.

We have little to bring you as far as local news; well, other than fires, murders, economic discontent. But this place, holding so many tax-paying emotives, pales so badly compared to the rest of the world on the hyperbole-index We are a bit embarrassed to bring up our problems.

However, at the tent of anachronistic anarchists things are comparable, still a lot of little bombs lit and awaiting opportunity to be tossed, thrown, left lying around till they explode; it is in the nature of emotives (anarchistic and otherwise), and therefore is a problem worth noting.

We have been considering acquiring a drone, for observation and potential defensive purposes.

As it is, the weight of cameras and emotion-seeking bombs is probably greater than the carrying capacity of big-box discount-store drones. And we lack sufficient pilots, lethal or otherwise, who can direct the photography or bombing.

But, a solution was proffered. The artists here have decided to draw “artistic conceptions” of what the drone images would look like if we actually did use one.  It is unlikely anyone will get hurt ( it is art after all) but tiny bits of fear of heights and surveillance paranoia might show up.

It takes awhile to gain some perspective, some elevation. Artists must imagine heights that are not readily available on a broad farming prairie, so high angles are just to make perspectival drawings, a means of plausible truth.

This aerial drawing is the Mackinaw River, our local bit of the flowing divine, with some rains blowing in, rain, adequate usually, but not to much, usually.

The tent, holding anachronistic irascibles is either just below your vision or among those squiggles around some light area in the middle right. Drawings are nice, viewers get to decide what is important to them; you must imagine things like temperature, humidity and color,

Color should include the ragweed, goldenrod, black-eyed susan, big bluestem,  and the multitudinous prairie weeds, pain should include sneezing and sweating and scratching.  And, hopefully, scratching an itch will be the only sign of blood.

Imagine if you wish, empathize if you can, the pain and suffering around here; or, better yet, extend it to those in very windy places, very watery places, very hot places, very bloody places – far away.

Once again, back  at the tent, She, emboldened by a moments reprieve from expectations (especially her own) seems, maybe, past the indelicacy of … the interruption.

Severity is her decided gift, a decision for all the crazies here at the tent; severity, lest the world spin even farther out of balance. Acute observation, nimble fingers, taut anatomy, severity in mind.  Closely fixed attention, decisions  hidden in the choice of placement, lest others mimic the skills (and demean the delicacy).

Trivial balance – boxes on boxes, squared and repeated left and right – endless, this is the enemy. Even here, credible artistic avant-gardes just want the ego form of balance – the lack of delicate attention, the bored response to failure, the (as it is) fear.

Delicacy, un-violated, broken, ripped, garishly devoured: delicacy, a veil necessary to exercise proportionate skeletal rhythms, the rush of trembling vibrations, the control.

Maybe long ago and far away, maybe, some orphaned dinner plates and a  need to consider what is past, (maybe lost) by some indelicate interruption were set to spinning, spinning, spinning the sounds of flutes and bowed strings.

All might fall in a moment, maybe devoured consumed depleted, maybe, (maybe – as has been noted – is a very big word), or, maybe …  delicately interrupted.

It is not as easy as some might think – colors … brings to mind a bit to much of what He decided to conjure – the constant banter of the fearful – from the old (as in olde) days.

The artist’s olde days, cave living and later, wandering with wonderers, traveling with kith and kin (and kin with travails), wagon shows, magic, clowns and clutter and raucous bands;  whilst other folks had castles – stones stacked upon unmovable stones, fancy colored flags, and servants, (slaves even). Masks and wands, dripping headhunter souvenirs to show no fear, only conquest; demons, witchcraft, powerful oracles, hidden selves, and all that color. Actually, various blinking garish displays, smudged browns and vaporizing grays have been, and remain, the most common color, plus blood, Blood!, the Blood, just Blood!; the uniting color.

He, (in a “bachelor” moment), decided the happy magnificence of artist’s magic color gestures might enthrall, and disrupt, a world of incarcerated fear, maybe (?) avoiding the blood.

But what a mis-observation, to be clowning with a paint brush; consider: would it be easier to enthrall fellow self-caged rapacious emotives, or, a cage full of  hue-hyped predatory carnivores.

Ah, artistics: here at the reunion of the irascible anarchists in the tent of the Temporary Museum of Enfant Terrible Culture attempting to retrain the detained former circus … a movable housing for the banter of fear, the exercise of folly, the momentary finesse.

As is observable, big-cats on the most precarious lurches – balance;  but, it is not as color coordination nor obedience to the magic paint wand … its’ to pounce.

Let’s all turn away and consider the emotive wonder of an olde-guy gesturing among fools (or for fools), and what is expected in nature’s severity;

maybe … the blood and delicacy of color.

She, interrupted (or was the interruption), has gone silent; somewhat hidden.

Summer’s days are accumulating, and the actions She had sought, expected, even desired – serving at the gathering – just didn’t happen.

She said (as best as possibly heard, interpreted, and passed along);  She said, “…you decide…”,  this was before She walked away calmly and directly to the river.

Summer is still here but the mornings are cool, afternoons temperate; a few leaves are changed – more dried-out than colored.

She, interrupted, might find the dried leaves adequate shade but inadequate isolation.

Summer will go, dried leaves then crackling ice will carry on.

She, interrupted, may (or may not) return to her post.