PHILOSOPHICAL DRAWINGS
Part 6: Books and Knowledge


Two Worlds: Open Book, Open Window and the Sky Between
(Portrait of Leonardo Da Vinci)

 

 

 Books and Knowledge

           In our universe there are endless galaxies, suns, and planets. Saturn and Earth are two such planets. In this endless infinity, it is amazing that on Earth, a small, partly hairless, close relative of Chimpanzees and Gorillas called Homo Sapiens has learned how to enclose what little they know between the covers of books. I read books in the small orbit of these great mysteries around me, my largely simian brain trying to grasp what is so hard to understand.  I look at a universe that is all questions and few answers. But the questions pour forth.... What is the meaning of the world and our existence in it? Certainly, the human experiment is highly dubious. What is the meaning of this book of my body that is written in the DNA of my own cells?  So much of my life has been lived in reference to books, seeking though their information and emptiness, looking for something solid and secure.  I have changed so much over the years and what I thought I knew is now uncertain. My certainties are all undermined.
        
 

My view and understanding of reality was very different in 1982 that it is now in 2004. Not surprising, certainly. Not surprising either, that no matter how hard I try I cannot enter again into exactly the mentality I had when I did these drawings---or event he exact mentality of a year ago. My old self is is something of a ghost. Not a ghost of the supernatural variety. But a ghost as all literature is a conversation of ghosts. I am a voice of a poem that is past. I once was someone else. I made art then as now, but my art then was very different. All art hovers in the no man's land between reality and loss, existence and death. That is me, a breath on the glass and whisper in the ear of time. I wished I could be more, I wished I could live forever, like all writers and artists. I live merely in the words of this page, as substantial as a groan for help in a dark room, a hand reaching out of the corner

           I do not agree or even like some of the beliefs I had in 1982. I used to think that the "Great Books", the Harvard Classics etc... were beyond my abilities to think critically about them. We were trained in public education to think the "canon" of "great books" was somehow holy. I know better now. It took me from 1970 to 1990, roughly, to learn to question the authority of these books. The concept of the "Great Books" is a political construction. The Classics or Great Books are not icons, though they are treated as such by partisans of various traditional religions or knowledge systems. Most of the great books are milestones in empires,dictatorships, elitist regimes that excuse Imperial cruelties. Celebrating Caesar's Gallic Wars, Plato's Republic, Machiavelli's the Prince, Aquinas' Summa Theologica, or Homer's Illiad is of dubious festivity.  They are excuses for injustice and apologies for elitism in government, violations of human rights, forced labor and exploitation of the poor.
         Except for rare beings like Da Vinci, who is far ahead of his time, the Renaissance does not yet offer much improvement over classical culture. It was really the rise of science and the Enlightenment that began to erode the injustice inherent in classical ideals. It was the Enlightenment that really began the questioning of superstitious books as the Bible or the Koran. Moreover it is only in recent years that the history of world culture has become sufficiently accessible that the "classics" from other cultures, are now open to criticism. It is clear to me that Aquinas's thought has a relation to the Inquisition. So likewise Confucius, or the Bhagavad Gita, have a relation to the injustice the Chinese feudal system or the Hindu caste system. I learned to question the ethics of Christian thinkers or literary exemplars as well as the questionable ideologies of the Persian mystics, such as Hafiz of Rumi. Culture is now a global phenomena that requires global analysis.
          But if the authority of past greatness is in question, on a global scale, who am I to offer my opinions? Am I to doubt myself as much as I doubt Plato and Lao Tzu?  Yes. This is what enlightenment is, or should be--- to learn to question, including questioning oneself.  I am a flawed human being, part of nature and I claim no divine sanction, indeed, the very notion of divinity seems absurd. So many of the authors of the "great books" claim divine sanction or inspiration. Foolish humanity has believed these nonsensical claims. A book like the Bible should be measured more by the corpses it created than the prayers it encouraged. So, there are no divine sanctions and therefore I must be as skeptical towards myself as well as towards the so called great books. I am fallible and imperfect and my works are too.
         My current interpretations of these drawings cannot be called "authoritative" in any total sense.  I already notice that during the course of writing this book that my view of these drawings and the writings of the period is over-simple and in some cases distorted. But that is not to say that my view is wrong.  I am trying to correct for possible distortions by being as accurate as I can be, and looking and re-looking at all the source material I have. I am enough of a trained historian to know how to do that. But I do have a "point of view" and thus, to some degree, a bias. No one is totally objective, and the claim to be totally objective is always questionable.  On the other hand, I am certainly not saying that anyone else could be more "objective" about these drawings than I can be.  There is a reality out there and there are facts about it that can be known.
        The argument between the notions that 'all views are subjective' and 'objectivity is possible' is an argument I have explored for many years. Noam Chomsky helped me see into this question more deeply than I might have done without his help. Chomsky said to me the simple idea that there is " a reality out there".  Edward Said, an very interesting scholar, who was very important to me in the early 1990's, and whose book Orientalism helped me see through the illusions of post-modernists and traditionalists, also helped me on this question. He writes that "verbal retrospection is very far from being an objective mirror of reality". ( Reflections on Exile, pg. 126) Yes, but Said does nto deny that there is a reality out there. It is true that my writing about these drawings is not entirely objective. But there is an objective reality, even if verbal retrospection or art does not quite reach the standard of complete accuracy. It is true that no one can be totally objective, but some are more objective that others. I am saying that no author is "authoritative" in any absolute sense and that I am fallible and am no doubt making mistakes even as I write. No reason to be paralyzed by this. I just try to be has honest as I can be. If I am a fish, I must swim in the waters of my own limitations as best I can. I try to see the world as accurately as I can. These drawings were themselves subjectively created, even if they had objective references. So telling the stories of what they meant to me then and now creates complex interactions between the actual world and my interpretations of it.
           I want this whole book of writings about these drawings to be a testament to making mistakes and learning from them.  One never stops learning. But for all that I am not saying that every view of the past is entirely "relative". There is no absolute, no pure, impartial or total point of view, as some religious fanatics claim.  But nor is there is a totally relative point of view either, as some or post modern fiction writers would like to claim. No one is entirely objective and no one is entirely subjective. There are degrees, nuanced views and always the necessity to try to be as accurate as possible, in addition to having compassion on the poor and questioning the powerful.  Admitting I am imperfect does not mean that others know more about my life than I do. It does not mean that I must deny the reality that is out there, and that I know to be as it is.
         My effort to admit my mistakes and learn from failure goes against the grain of a society that is all about success. The corporate partisans of the "power of positive thinking" pretending to never fail or doubt, as they say on their infomercials. But that is just it. I deny the religious delusions that cause people to live a life of lies, believing in positive outcomes that will never happen. The religion of American success is a similar delusion to believing that there is life after death. In American culture winning is all. But this is a fraud. Everyone loses at many points in their lives. We learn from our losses and it is our losses that teach us about how the world really is. This is not to say that there is no point in doing well. I am trying to do well here by writing clearly and presenting things as clearly as I can.
         Perhaps if I hadn't spent so many years with dusty shelves of books: what would I be like then? Too many years studying symbols and dry ideas leaves unsure where reality begins and sadness ends. I'm not trying to say after Ecclesiastes that much knowledge is deep sorrow.

 

 

        But much knowledge is much sorrow---- not because an imaginary god supplies some sort of escape. Ecclesiastes and its fatalism does not tell the truth about the world. There are new things under the sun everyday. Each new life is an experiment that the earth offers to the future. The entire self making miracle or evolution is all about newness and an earth on which life that created life out of itself. There is no escape from earth, as Buddhist or Biblical writers imagine, and consequently knowledge is the only way to face the inescapable sorrows of reality, the facts of our existence: our losses, aging, sickness and deaths.. Knowledge is not only sorrow, it is also life and joy.
           One thing I know is true: I spent too many years haunted by signs and symbols that I didn't know how to read. And when I finally learned to read them at last, they didn't say anything worth repeating. No. That is not quite accurate. Rather, I should say, what I have read in life is the struggle of living. My genes read themselves to make me when I was conceived in my mother's womb. I've been reading ever since trying to make sense of why I am here: why do I exist: what is existence? Amazing as genes are, what does it all mean? Some days bring me a joy where I know all is worth the suffering and I am brother to birds flying. Other days show me the weariness of being, the heavy weight of time, the forward march of becoming, the opening flower of sadness that carries me like a red blossom down the inevitable stream of being and dying.
        All these years of reading and seeking and still I feel as if the person I thought I was is not who I am in actuality. There is truth in the idea that reading does not prepare one for real life, and certainly does not prepare one for work or responsibility, in the corporate sense of serving a boss. For most people in America, being responsible means serving the arbitrary dictatorship of a corporation. Corporations are unjust totalitarian agents. Subservience has value to many people who must work for these entities. They internalize the ideas of their masters. But there are other and better forms of responsibility. To take care of nature, the old, the babies, the sick, these are better than punching the clock of the corporate man. Literature and non-fiction,--- my education in short--- always gave me the idea that I had the right to be my own person. I have rights, nature has rights. Me and the birds matter more than any corporate entity. That is a dangerous idea in this society. Reading made me a rebel and a renegade. Some people despised me for this and thought me arrogant and cocky, rightly so, perhaps, in some instances. I was often prone to passionate enthusiasm, even when I was wrong.  I regret this. But, at the same time, I always have tried to learn the truth and when it became clear I was wrong, I retreated, admitted my error and said I was sorry. But still, mistakes and all, I try to assert the rights of those who are weak and unheard.
         Reading prepares one to dream and desire and to see the world in new terms. But it is not a replacement for experience. But I had enough experience and read widely enough to think myself a person who had value. Maybe that was foolish and I should have been a better drone, more subservient to corporate culture. I just couldn't do it. In any case, time changes us, and there is no stopping the change. There is only the effort to praise what passes. I have not gotten wiser as I have gotten older: I only see much deeper. I am not better than I was. Certainly. Indeed, time has made me feel I have many fewer options to change myself now than I once had. My awareness of our helplessness and mechanical thoughtlessness has increased even as I realize that what must be done requires that we must help each other. But even as I know this, as I get older, I am aware that fewer and fewer people listen to what I am actually saying. Old age brings isolation as those you knew drift away or die. Indeed, old age appears to be mostly about loss, loss not just of the people one knew, and of the past one lived in, but loss of aspects of oneself and eventually, total loss of oneself too. Soon there will be little left of me but the shell of these words, left behind me like and abandoned bird's nest.
        I don't think Marcel Proust was right that the past could be truthfully recaptured, transforming the past into a mythic preserve. The past cannot be made into a sort of  petrified forest of memory--- an entombed existence of  nominally eternal recurrence, as Proust or Nietzsche conceived it. Having read Swann's Way I am not sure that the 19th aristocratic fantasy of what life is about is what I would wish to preserve. But that is neither here nor there. I think we can approximate something like the past in art--- to hold the past like a hushed breath, a gasp of air, a clutched mirror of what was,---but it always it is a similitude, an effort, a sketch. One must always remember that nothing is eternal, and that the very notion of eternity is a conceit, a mental construct, a chimera made half of concept and half of deceiving mirrors. But my effort is strangely opposite to Proust's. I am not trying to make the past eternal or of  petrified mythic meaning. This book I am making is paradoxical, since, when I did the drawings in the 1980's,  I was seeking to create myths out of existence. But I am not seeking to make myths now, but to undo the myths I made. I'm seeking to create a non-mythic preserve, an  memoir of how certainties created errors, a remembrance of how eternity failed, a meditation on my un-tombed existence, in praise of real forests.  I want to record the conflict of a self who is not what he was, even if he is the same person.
        This book is merely a series of fragile re-enactments, re-visited failures, snapshots of the only impermanences that matter---it is not a dip into eternity. This book is not about eternal recurrence, nor is it about timelessness. It is about acceptance of the changes that have occurred in my life. I hold my books to my breast as dearly as deformed children who I love with all my heart. My books are my beloved half-blind, one armed, children. I am not setting up an ideal self to live by or an example of what others should be like. As a historian who has seized the right to write my own history, I have a responsibility to be accurate and socially responsible. This means I must tell the truth and try to give voice to the powerless.

Ecstatic Despair

In the end, I have rebelled against fiction, and only what to write about cherishing the real and the actual world that I have lived in and known. I want to show my burn-downed castles. I want to show all these sad candles that are about to go out. These torn and tattered dreams of a perfection that would never be and a hope that could only wither and die. Sad flowers withering and dying.  I was a little boy who struck out at the plate every time one year when I played baseball. I got to crying even before I got to the plate, sure  I would strike out again. I was that fragile young man who tried to find the truth in so many places and failed so often. I did not claim to be great. I just wanted to find a way to live. I fought against the self pity that would drag me into oblivion. Life is a buoy at sea and one day I will have to let it go. No, it is not that dismal. There were glorious days too.         I fought to carve myself out of world that wanted and tried, all my years, to make me other than what I am. Human society is about power and control and resisting that power is very hard. To love the earth: one would think this would be an easy task. But it never has been. Society seeks to drag one into the dream of difficult and obsessive wealth, and this distorts all that one sees and does.

        To live in such a world seeking to find a way to praise our rare earth is exquisitely thankless, difficult and painful. I have live a life of lonely ecstasies, always seeking, full of profound understanding in a vacuum of an unlistening society that goes one destroying the earth I love. This is not self-pity-- to state this bald fact. The human world is cruel and self destructive. To serve life and earth is a thankless, arduous task in a society that cares more for death and abstract and unreal entities like money, property and gods.
        I know I will not last forever. But these stories might last longer than I.  I just want to tell the stories and to do it as truly as I can. In this sense I am not Proustian in my attempts here. I am not trying to do a "Remembrance of Things Past" but rather I'm seeking to understand what my past was--- to undo the myths I created and stand naked in the cold light of cruel time. This is not an easy endeavor, since the ground under my feet is shifting, or rather , I shift and the ground below me is always the trustworthy earth. 
       Yet, here I walk on an uncertain earth that silently groans from eons of marvels of evolution. I am deconstructing my own mythic imagination, taking apart those dreams of other worlds trying to find the ground were my aging body meets the evolving history of life coming out of the seas. I do not want my past to be "another country" from which I am in exile. My country is the sum of what was and am. I am learning to live with myself in the lands of both memory and presence. Those alien days when I walked a lighter step and wandered further and had energy that seemed endless. I am at home without a nation. I accept my homelessness as a place in the midst of my lost and seeking homeland. Home is my travel toward a heart-land born of memory and longing for the land of my childhood, with something of that land appears even in places far away from home. I am this looking, this seeking for what I already know and love, this reverence for green, this acceptance of my aging skin.
I am a meditation upon an egg, a sky that no longer seeks for gods, but looks into the mystery of being on an endlessly sad and lovely, but endangered earth.

    

       I accept You Can Never Go Home Again" as Thomas Wolfe put it, but still, like Wolfe's other book, Look Homeward, Angel, I "look homeward" everyday and am almost there.  Sure, I am lonely for my own past, lonely for friends who are gone, lonely for those who have died. I wish I could have again those lost days, happy days, blue days, sad days, salad days, days of youth, experiment, young skin, first loving, smelling hair and daffodils. So many flowers. Even now there are those to share with me the burden of being lonely on earth. Still others to come might join me in celebrating what is here and what has been lost.  In the end everyone is like a child left behind--- a lonely child still left on the enchanted garden of our earth--- so, all is not lost. All is not lost, but most is lost. Most of all that is dear is lost. One’s parents die and best friends fade into obscurity. Nothing I can do to change that. I love the child that I have made and in my child is the book of my memory. My art works and writings might persist. I will be lost. What I have loved remains in faded notebooks. In the end one is alone with nothing left but the book of being that one has made together with those one loves. Our book is a family of being, an earth of remembering. These fragile notes are my text of life, my yellowing bequest, my browning pages recording what I cared about most. Pairings of my heritage, leavings of longings now lost. One does one's best to live in a way that leaves more good in the world than was there when one arrived.  I try to tell the truth as best I can,  and even if I do not have the great voice of a "Prophet", I do not believe in prophets anyway and do not want puffed up rhetoric. I merely try to sing the songs of my labored heart as best as I can sing.  Do not come to me for spiritual sublimity. I adjured that long ago. I rest in my fragile mortality and have nothing but this poor earth of life to live on, trying with all my strength to see the marvel of what existence is left to me. Sad beauty is all I can offer, earth and green things and dust.

     My memory cannot be the reader's memory, as much as I might wish that the reader could crawl inside my head and heart and feel and see what I feel and see. "Take this my deepest joy of all my years and give it to the poor", I'd like to say.  But that is not possible. I don't want to pretend. All I can do is show a way to think about how life is and has been for me.  I  therefore hope others would see things in these drawings that have escaped me. Maybe they will see themselves in my drawings, feel their own pains in my pains or see their own loves in my loves. There are certainly meanings that I have not brought out in this book, or meanings that others can create that I have neglected to bring out.  It is all about sharing what I have come to know with readers who might care about what has mattered to me. I invite you to give birds the freedom to live longer lives in the wilds of the restored forests. Give yourself this gift too. Let imagination go until it tires of itself and returns to the sad earth where we all seek refuge in the green arms of life.

          I invite you into the complex world of these drawings, where questions abound and the seeking never ceases, and the only place to rest is in gazing upon the sad and sympathetic faces that are looking out toward you and mirroring you. There are many ways to see these drawings. But there is only one interpretation of these drawings I would oppose. There is a mythic interpretation of these drawings that is possible, and I sometimes took such an interpretation some years after I did them.  They can be assessed from a Jungian or a 'spiritual' or "traditional" point of view..  I do not assess these drawings as mythic or spiritual documents here, and deliberately. Indeed, such a reading of these drawings would be a lie against my youth as well as my current person. There are paradoxically constants in my person as well as provisional tendencies in my character. I called these drawings "assays" when I was doing them, and they present potential meanings and predictions, tendencies and possibilities, in addition to presenting more of less obvious or suggestive meanings. But I know there are aspects of these drawings that are problematic. I knew that when I did them. There is some daring in a few of these works just as there is some platitude and cliché. How could there not be? To completely eliminate cliché is to eliminate our humanity, because clichés are common expressions. I was trying to tell the truth and much of waht is called 'truth' is mindless repetition and unexamined habit. But for all that, the drawings are not cliche most of the time. They are not always as naive as they might appear, nor as knowing as I might sometimes like to imagine them. They try on masks and then they take them off and try on other masks.

         There are tendencies in these drawings that led me into harms way or which represented philosophical orientations which I latter decided were harmful or mistaken. It would be irresponsible of me to let these meanings and tendencies stand unquestioned and unchallenged. A few of the drawings suggest "spiritual" tendencies, I am not denying that,  I am saying that these tendencies are not to be taken seriously, except as vestiges or other tendencies in my person at the time---hypertrophies of impulses and yearnings that had not yet been really tested in real life. These 'spiritual yearnings' died cruel deaths in the harsh world of experience.  These drawings are archives of the hopes, fears and dreams of a young man, who had not yet come to know himself. So the drawing represent virtualities, not what actually happened. These drawings are being assessed by an older man, who is not as gullible as he was when he was younger. Something of my current self is in them, but something of my confused yearning and later searches are in them too. They explore possibilities long abandoned, like a ghost town I lived in once, not realizing its people were ghosts.
     Yet, though I might oppose certain interpretations of these works,  I still must assert that there is no miraculously true, one and only way to interpret these drawings, these drawings or anything else. This is not to deny science. On the contrary. I think only a scientific or quasi-scientific concern with accurate perception can come even close to describing reality.  The real mysteries of life are not found in imagined miracles or religous dogmas, in stale priesthoods of Byzantium or Mecca, but rather in obvious and often overlooked occurrences, ordinary days and nights where dogs smell tree trunks, cats sleep and plants germinate. It is a mistake to look for the ultimate meaning of life in Tibet or on the mountain tops. The Tibetans did not know it, whatever some priests may claim, or however much the Dalai Lama smiles Buddha-like in the public relations he does before cameras.The Dalai Lamas were the figureheads of a political theatre. He is merely a Public Relations man pretending to be a reincarnation of another sales executive--an earlier Dalai Lama, who himself was salesman trained form birth to sell a religion to a population, justifying the power of a Tibetan bureaucracy.  There is no ultimate, absolute or transcendent truth, and those who claim to have possession of such truths are either very young, liars, insane, deluded or charlatans.  Transcendent truths are merely the big business of small minds.   Transcendent truths are merely advertisements for overblown institutions, exercises in correct thinking, systems of mind control meant to bolster and encourage reactionary ways of seeing the world.

The meaning in life is not in Berlin, Moscow, New York or in cathedrals. It is not in books. Though it might be in all these, it might even be where the dog is pissing on the townhouse wall or where a group of mentally challenged men and women walk through the shopping mall. It is in your breathing and the seeing of your eyes, in the moment of your passing.  The meaning of life is where your fingers are reaching and where your eyes watch the seeing of children. Truths I once held to be fallible have since proven false. Your eyes have slipped and the thought you thought was a certainty has become a dream and you no longer understand why you embraced it . I cannot suppose that what I say here is true. But the concrete and obvious appears to be what is most true. But every child knows that the simple,  important things are true. Grass. Playing. Eating. Mother. Father. Friend. Go whatever way you wish, in the end it is your own heart you must face. Remember the child that you were and weep. In that weeping, remember those glad days of sun and a body running in circles, light shinning on a beaming child's face, bright with sheer laughter. That was you, that little boy or girl, that happiness running in the yard, that endless play until your mother called you home for dinner. And once you got home for dinner that smell in the kitchen, your mother's smile and face, the way she put the plate in front of you.

          I can only hope that my perceptions are accurate and that something of I what might say might help someone ease their own inquiry into the meaning of life. Part of the reason I am writing this analysis of these drawings is that I want to understand how it is that I understood so little of what these drawings meant when I did them. The little that I thought I once knew turned out to be false knowledge, and I was wrong. Am I wrong now too? Perhaps. The drawings were coming from a place very deep in me and they have many other meanings than I thought were meant. It is shocking to find out I am not the persona I thought I was.
         I was once a person who traveled elsewhere to find the meaning of life and sought out teachers far away. I actually believed there were enlightened beings in the world and that the truth could be taught to me, like driving a car. Then one day I learned at last that what truth or meaning I might find in life was not about travel or teachers. I was as much a meaningful part of the world as a plant or a deer in the forest, and traveling was about going to find myself, and teachers might be anyone along the road, not those who claimed to know the "Truth". Indeed, I learned that those who claim the "Truth", capital "T", are  almost invariably liars or con men. Religions are the sad repository of myths created by those who exploit the disappointed dreams of naive and insecure people. I sought religion because I sought another life than that promised by American notions of money and success. I sought religion out of disappointed dreams, lost loves, grasping at a knowledge that could buffer the suffering I saw all around me. But in the end I somehow escaped the lie of religion. How could have I have changed so much?. How could I have at last became myself, when I tried for so many years to be other than who I am?.
       One thing I think I have learned is to be more tolerant and willing to admit my own fallibility. Let us say I am a failed philosopher who has not yet stopped thinking. "Fail better" Samuel Beckett said. Yes. I am trying to fail better. I was aware from an early age that spinning out intellectual theories is primarily about self-protection and self-defense. Philosophy is part amour, part attack. Imagine that: the whole history of philosophy is little more than an effort to create systems of thought that control how reality is seen and operated---mostly in order to insure certain classes or regimes stay in power. Totalistic thinking creates dogmas. And what is dogma but an effort to stall the inevitability of change and deny the fallibility of being human. Dogmas are castles, guns or military embankments meant to secure power for those who ought not to have it. In other words, what is called "philosophy" is mostly the intellectual militia of the paranoid and insecure. That is why I gave up philosophy.  In contrast to intellectual militias, nature is not about Laws and Dogmas, whatever those who benefit from doctrinal truth in science or religion might claim. Nature is about diversity and diversity is about reducing competition and this reducing harms and violence. In contrast most of what is called culture is about increasing competition, suppressing diversity and maximizing violence. The more exalted the system of knowledge the more likely the atrocities. The more rigid the dogma, the more absolute the claim to know, the greater the chance of harm being done to others. No one is infallible, no book is perfect and irreproachable, no person is perfect. If anyone or any church or institution claims to be infallible,  begin doubting and questioning and if the questions are refused, recognize that something is wrong and walk away.  This is why I cling to nature and am skeptical of cultural hegemonies.
         What is knowledge?: what is worth writing down: what is worth remembering?  What if the things that the world has deemed important, the great warriors, the religious heroes, the presidents and rich men, are, in fact, what matters least? Suppose I told a history of my weaknesses, a history of where I went wrong and the mistakes I made?

One only lives once, it is best to take a chance. Live, give yourself away for free. Why not?  Flowers give themselves away with all they have. The journey of life is short. Besides---who cares what others think of me in the end, when I die, it is only my voice still trying to tell the truth in pages I can no longer see or hear. I traveled all those years with my eyes open, looking down streets, into the eyes of women, at my own child looking back at me. Isn't it  time to account for myself---to try to say what a life worth living was or might be? What is the good of writing or remembering if it does not liberate, free us, or take us to a future that is fuller and more appreciative of the wonder and sadness of  life? Even the suicide that writes a long book about his death before he drowns himself or pulls the trigger, writes because he hopes others will not go the way of despair that he had to go. "Do not go the way I went, but look where you are going more than I did" is what the suicide tries to say.  I am not suicidal. But I find myself wishing to tell someone " Try to find the meaning of who you are early, if you can, rather than giving yourself away in mindless sacrifice to invisible ideas. Avoid Philosophy, and hold to the actual. Say yes to everything in the world that you love".

( this little drawing is a sort of memorial my brother, who tried to escape from life into drugs and into the sea-going life, where he was a sailor and lost himself going to sea.)

      But I am not interested in making Christian confessions, nor an effort to improve my chances of advancement in a mythical "next world" . I refuse to enter the casino where Pascal's Wager is meaningful. What is Pascal's Wager anyway but another Faust myth: selling one's "soul" to a deity in return for power or immortality. I am not interested in transcendental magnifications. I wrote the Faust myth to death years ago. In six or seven notebooks in 1980 and 81 I wrote the Faust myth out of my flesh and blood. Goethe and Marlowe and Mann died in me. Not interested in that . Rather, I am interested in improving the chances of understanding and appreciating this world. Things of great concern to me 20 years ago now seem either wrong or irrelevant. Gods, for instance,  which seemed important to me 20 years ago now seem to be merely  inflated religious and mythic concepts, fog and mirrors hiding institutional motives. I rarely think of gods and myths except to remark to myself the context of those who use them or profit from their use. Respect for human rights and nature's rights, toleration of others provided they do no harm,  real concern for actualities on the earth seem to me to be values far more important than archaic religions with their myths about other worlds. I have given up on transcendental abstractions.
       
     But what about Books?  But what about books, books are not entirely abstract things, and they have been important objects in my life since childhood. Gods I can do without: Archetypes be gone. But books---- let gods die, but leave me some books--- books are something that were always important to my hands and eyes. They were my friends and my refuge. I'm not exactly a bibliophile, but I love books, bookstores and libraries. How could I live without books? I who have always loved coffee shops and Cafes. I have sat reading studying or writing in Cafe Trieste, Vesuvio's or Savoy Tivoli in San Francisco: great and not so great cafes in New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, or Cleveland. Little town cafes. suburban cafes, Five and Dime cafes, Black Cat Cafes, Cafe Louvre: Red Star Cafe. There was Kay's books which I will speak of in a minute and West 25th Street Books, where me and Adam Brodsky, Jim Lang, Steve Smith, warm hearted Nancy, Marian's electric mind of the times, Russ Vidrick, Terry Provost and others read their hearts out every Saturday in Cleveland. My wife and I would walk in with our baby and listen to them all voice their deepest thoughts in round robin fashion, one poet taking off form the one who ran before, with not schedule and no director.
       One of my warmest pleasures in life has been sitting in a  lonely cafe drinking coffee or eating bread or black bean soup and thinking about life, writing in a beloved notebook. What would a sad cafe be without a good book in which I could read or write? I can't remember ever living entirely without books even on those rare occasions when I briefly decided, ( probably because of some book I read!!) that all books and word-knowledge was vanity and I should give up books to rely on direct experience alone. Certainly direct experience is invaluable. But books help to define what one has experienced. The world is not only outside the eyes, but also in the mind. Nature looks at us from without, but also from within. I close my eyes and still feel the sun shinning in the forest behind my eyelids. I open my eyes to the time I live in and close my eyes and see Shakespeare's King Lear walking with his Fool in the midst of a storm. How will Lear understand the world he lives in, how will I? What is Raskolnikov thinking now? What does Basho see in the flower on the road traveling north. What would life be without books? How much wider and interesting  the world is because of them!!
      
     Indeed, the drawing above that heads this chapter  is called Two Worlds for a reason. The drawing seems to ask the question: what is the relation of what is in one's own heart and mind to what is in the world ? How does what is inside books relate to what is inside oneself ? And how does what is inside books relate to what is out there in the world, outside the eyes? And moreover, how does the past, present and future relate to the inner-book of the heart and the outer-book of nature ? Is the notion of a 'book" a valid metaphor for how the world really is? Genes and the implicate order and simplicity they imply seem more valid as how nature is that books, with their self protecting cover and linear directionality.... but Ill have to think about that further....

      The person in the first drawing that opens this chapter is a imaginary portrait of Leonardo Da Vinci. It is a recollection of his marvelous late self portrait in red chalk on pink paper at age 60, possibly the the only image of him from his own hand. ( 1513 Biblioteca Reale, Turin) It may not be a self portrait, exactly, but it has a certain similarity to the one portrait that is thought to be authentic (See Portrait of Leonardo,1519, in the Windsor Leoni volume 12726, probably done by a student of his).  My drawing is is not an accurate copy of these images. It was done from memory and interprets Leonardo in a way that recalls the original without imitating it. The angle of the head is about the same as the original as is the fall of the hair. In any case, in my drawing, Leonardo is holding a book open to a window and light is pouring in through the window. The only reference to this drawing in my writings of the time is as follows:

  " The logic I am speaking of is not a rational logic like mathematics. It is an underground logic, a logic of nature, a logic hidden in the structure of nature and built into the mind... a logic that can only be perceived and shown obliquely... as we perceive sunlight illuminating the pages and words of a book when the book is too far away to be able to read it  or interpret its meaning. Nature is the model of all books and the sky holds words and laws that we can only dimly read in moments of illumination"

    
        This quote defining an intuitive logic inherent in nature is from a long essay on Chance and the Imagination I wrote  in 1980. The text of this essay specifies that this drawing of Da Vinci illustrates the concept in this paragraph. The last sentence is confusing, since it seems to suggest something about science or an obscure mystical vision. The idea of a 'logic of nature' comes from John Dewy and the theory of evolution. But if I bracket out the mystical vision and simply read the sentence literally, the meaning changes. Im trying to define existence in space..............

So, read literally, what the quoted paragraph above is saying is that Da Vinci ( in the drawing) is showing us an idea about the 'logic of nature'. This 'logic' is visible in the sunlight pouring in the window onto the pages of the book. The book itself seems to contain hieroglyphs that appear to be interacting with the light and air.      The drawing appears to describe two kinds of reality. The first is the process of luminous lines and spirals that dominate the entire room with light and space, and the second is the separate world of Euclidean forms that descends down on Da Vinci from above and which is also visible in the book and some of the objects on the table. It would seem that the drawing is trying to define the relation of forms to formlessness and process. Or better yet, the drawing is trying to define the intangible nature of light and air, the feel of space and how air and light hold meaning in time. The drawing is trying to use Da Vinci to reconcile conflicting views of existence. It is also trying define for me the nature of how I feel about the space of existence and the relation of mind to spatial existence or extension. In other words how does it feel to stand in the midst of space and time, inside my body in a world of light .

Two Worlds: Open Book, Open Window and the Sky Between (Leonardo Da Vinci)

            Is it strange that I would have Da Vinci say something that actually is mine to say? Why I didn't simply picture myself I do not know. I did so in other drawings. Certainly an affection for Leonardo is part of it. It was not that I thought Da Vinci carried more weight than my lowly self. Did I need high heroes to bolster a rather timid ego? No, it was more of a love of his curiosity-- a curiosity that I shared, that I am trying to celebrate here. I also was aware of Leonardo's love of vortexes, spirals, the fabulous motions of water and all recurved and serpentine motions. The Philosophical Drawings in general are hymns to curves, waves, spirals, vortexes and undulating patters of fire, growth and life.
             In any case, in the drawing, the book as a human and hand-made thing, (resembling my own notebooks). Da Vinci is holding up the book to the light. He seems to think that this demonstration has meaning, and that the unreadable symbols of the book are somehow explained by their interaction with sunlight and space between the book and the window. Leonardo is trying to define the nature of existence by reference to the motion of light in space and time. This is a profound thing, really, if one pauses to think about it. Leonardo is trying to show the depth of space and light as having a fundamental relation to human existence, to human creativity, to human productions. In other words nature and human nature are really the same thing. The mind, at its deepest levels, shares a fundamental relation to light and space.
          A simpler, perhaps less interesting, explanation is that the drawing presents the idea of "two worlds": first, the ideal world of the book and the Platonic forms above Leonardo's head. The second world is the actual world of sunlight, existence, space, time, objects on the table and the book, in addition to Leonardo himself.  That is more or less what I meant by the drawing when I did it.  I was defining different ways of defining what is real and trying to imagine if there was an interaction between the ideal and the real: human symbols as opposed to natural facts. This is a theme is Leonardo's work too, since in his drawings, mathematical diagrams often contend against rounded forms modeled with exquisite loveliness.  Leonardo had not yet escaped the medieval mentality. I hadn't escaped it either, when I did this drawing--though I was straining toward a way of seeing beyond religion.
        Now I would say that the mystical Platonism implied in parts of this drawing is something I no longer agree is "real", as I have explained elsewhere in this book.  So, even if I state that Plato has nothing to do with this drawing, as I see it now, I can still say that human imagination and reality interact in complex ways. But the drawing draws attention to the interplay of books and reality and reality and minds. It is above all a drawing about the relation of space and light to human existence.  Yes. This subject still matters to me. The ideal world of the book and the abstract Euclidean forms above Leonardo's head (let's not call them Platonic), could symbolize the abstract world of human creations of whatever kind. Gods and philosophical concepts are virtual objects or virtual realities that are not actual as are birds and trees. Ideas can be delusional or reasonable, beneficial or potentially harmful. Ideas can promote murder and unjust power just as they can encourage peace, equality and fair treatment. Ideas can also seem to be fair and equitable ideas when in fact they are the opposite. Ideas can deceive as well as lead to truths. Ideas and virtual concepts do influence the world we live in, whether we wish it or no.    
        Indeed most humans live almost completely enclosed in systems of abstract knowledge, myths and human centered concerns, scarcely aware of the actual world of other beings and nature that surrounds them. Drive down any highway in any big city and you can see how alienated people are driving in the metal cars, divorced from the earth and enclosed behind glass and probably listening to music through headphones or radio voices pumped through the air into the metal cars. Or they are talking on cell phones. Go into any church. God concepts are basically like cars, metal boxes--- blinders against reality. There are no "Gods", no "Man", there are only individuals, actualities, things, minds, lives, all part of nature. But to take off the encrustations of ideology and religion, myth and cultural enclosure is no easy matter. The blinders are thick and largely unconscious. Advertising and propaganda are about exploiting symbols to try to 'manufacture consent', as Chomsky put it.
         Alienation from the earth results from excessive reliance on systems of abstractions; Aquinas, Marx, Mao, Jesus are all promoters of abstract sytems. The drawing above is trying to grasp what a good relation between the world of ideas and the world of nature and actual things might be. Leonardo himself seems to have become more and more realistic as he got older as well, leaving abstract ideology behind him. With the exception of the strange Deluge series, his later drawings are increasingly scientific. I agree with him.  This happened with Thoreau as well. Thoreau becomes less and less transcendentalist, more an more down to earth. It is important to come down to earth and plant one's feet in the fragile world of actuality. Da Vinci was trying to escape from the myths of his time, as was Thoreau.  I am trying to escape for the myths of our time. The world, such as it is, is what we have to work with. There is no escape into religion, poetic fantasy, technology or other ideologies, capitalist, Marxist or otherwise. One must face the real with open eyes, however hard, however painful. I only have one life, and it is up to me to live it well or not. What si real, waht is not real? That is the question.
       The Two Worlds drawing is conceived of in general enough terms that one interpretation does not exhaust it. Da Vinci is asking a question in the drawing, or presenting objects to meditate on. His question  is:  what  does the meaning that is carried inside books or minds has to do with the meaning of sunlight and air streaming through a window? Or how does the subjective realm of the human imagination ( books, gods, language, numbers, symbols) relate to the world of actual space, time, sunlight, open windows and hard objects?  This is a very good question. It is a question I have pondered for decades now. And my views have changed radically with my experience. It is the world that we must concentrate on. The earth is our teacher. Science is what matters. I need to be skeptical of symbols and systems of abstractions.
         I did this drawing in praise of Leonardo, asking of him one of the big questions of my life. My image of Leonardo is partly an image of my concerns at that time I did the drawing. But it also an attempt to grapple with the genius of Leonardo himself as a scientist and observer of the actual. I loved Leonardo from an early age and love him still. His was a marvelous mind, a scientist and artist all at once. My view of him has matured over the years. Now I love his adventurous mind, his love of birds and flying, his endless curiosity, love of water and mountains, his willingness to study the human heart, fossils, seashells, rock formations.  I love the wonderful landscapes are in the backgrounds of his paintings. They are landscapes that would not be envisioned for another 400 or 500 years, amazing panoramas of the earth as a crucible of evolution. In his mountains and flower studies he suggests in paint the theory of evolution long in advance of it being discovered or created by Darwin, Wallace and others. I love his anatomy drawing such as those did of the vortex patterns of blood as it washes against the values of the heart. Amazingly enough, his drawing of this was only confirmed as accurate in the last 25 years. He drew clouds dumping their rain over mountain and valley. He drew water bubbling up out of depths. He drew the beauty of human muscles, birds wings, rivers flowing, lithe cats, human hair.  I love his drawings of chain links, pulleys, hair braids, octahedrons, coitus, neck muscles, horses, beautiful boys, ancient old men with no teeth, and luminous faces. What a man of amazing insight, fresh eyes and a willingness to see outside of the conventions of his time---openly and honestly looking at the world everyday of his life. This is a drawing of praise and thanks for Leonardo, as well as a meditation on existence and the meaning of light and space.
          So the drawing I did of Leonardo gropes toward and understanding of what the world means. When I did the drawing I did not yet see just how marvelous Leonardo's insistence on avoiding the mystical and staying with the actual and the real and earthly actually was. What is actuality? What is air? what is sunlight?, how do we talk about the actual facts of our existence here on this wonderful planet floating in the immensity of space? How can our minds penetrate and see further into this mystery? Leonardo is such a great example of this effort to look directly and life, without recourse to fictional myth and other confabulations of religion, myth or custom.

I am making a book about a book here.  Philosophical Drawings is a book and was conceived to be a literary and artistic creation from its inception. It was an object in which I have recorded images and drawings, now complicated by an exegesis written 20 years after the fact. I no longer have much belief in the ideal realm that Leonardo exhibits in the drawing above. But I still love books and I certainly still love sunlight, shinning down on books or any other object. So, in terms of the alternative presented by Leonardo above, my concerns are now mostly with the actual and a not the ideal.

Silent words (unsaid)

   
        Concerning the actuality of this book:  I did the Philosophical Drawing between 79 and 86, roughly, ---though some of the paintings were done as late as 1991--- and during that time I lived in San Francisco, New York City, Maine, Indiana and Cleveland Ohio and visited Europe, where I did drawings in Paris and Amsterdam. I had various kinds of jobs, dishwasher, apprentice furniture maker, bookstore clerk, waiter, oriental rug store rug worker and eventfully oriental carpet repair man and restorer. But my concern was not money, rather I sought a job in which I would have to work as little as possible so as to give me time for creative work. I sought work outside corporate conformity and control. I wanted to understand the world I was living in. I have always resisted involvement or conformity to corporate culture to the degree that I could. Indeed, I have considered it something of a Gandhian obligation to resist and protest corporate power.
       In the many places I lived between 1979 and 91 I brought books along. I do not remember which books but certainly my journals and notebooks always went with me. The Philosophical Drawings themselves were done in green, black, red or canvas-colored journals, or sketchbooks, roughly 9x11 inches. Many of the drawings and a few of the paintings were done on fine paper notebooks which I managed to find in specialty shops New York and London. So the drawings are drawings meant to be in a book along with a text, and often the drawing is itself a text or accompanied by text. So the drawings were done in widely separate places and times but always in a similar sized book with text of some kind. The line between writing and drawings is always blurred.  I employed a consistent style despite the various environments in which they were done.  There are slight stylistic changes over time, but mostly the changes from drawing to drawing are not stylistic but based on content. My drawing books or journals were the mirrors in which I sought to reflect on the changed places and meanings of times that were also changing. There is also a deepening investigation of my own interior life. Who was I and what was the world I saw in this mirror of meanings in places and times ? The drawings are veils made up of my mind and heart. They are veils that hover delicately between  my heart, mind and the reality of the places I lived from 1979 to 1991.  This is the way life was and is, complexes of time in mirrors and mirrors and veils drifting over forgotten things and faces: mirrors and veils or time and place and faces and all the mirrors and veils and and places all mixed together with no absolute certainty as to what is where and who is when and why.  In this strange veil of mirrors and times and veils and places I try to some sort of order and meaning. There it is beauty and nature and sadness and longing reflected back at you, veiled, but mirrored back onto loveliness of the world and myself,  ourselves within it. So to try to create understanding  I am writing this book and this book involves the  further complication of  interpreting these drawings in 2004-6. I want to take the mirrors and veils away and show life as it was, to the degree that is possible.
      To focus on one of the places I lived: in 1982, when I did some of these drawings, I was living in a tiny apartment with a large room and a bathroom and couch covered with an ocher blanket, an old recliner chair and a desk where i could sit and write or draw. I was working at a bookstore in Cleveland, getting on a dirty bus every morning and riding past downtown Lake Erie. Once I walked though the Euclid Arcade to Prospect Street and past the pawn shops and bums and drunks I was near the bookstore. There I was to help customer or restock dusty shelves with used Harlequin Romance novels someone read years ago and sold to Kay for a pittance. I also restocking the latest issue of Model Train magazine, or more interestingly, the works of W.E.B. Dubois in the Black history section or Wordsworth and Mark Twain the the literature section. It was a phenomenal bookstore with 3 floors of every title imaginable. The bookstore was owned by Rachel "Kay" Rowan, a hard-as nails- old lady with white hair who only could be seen smiling once in a great while. Mostly she was concerned with money and her fingers did not seem made for touching anything but dollar bills, cash registers and quarters.  But she just greedy: she was also very brave. One day a man came in a pulled a gun on her and demanded her money, and she yelled at him and told him to "put that thing away" and chased him out of the store. She was like the forbidding grey-haired  old school teacher--- the one all the kids respected, but of whom all the kids were afraid . She knew this, of course, and cultured even more fear from her employyees and customers, always in the interst of making more money. Though with customers she could also be fawing and even smile, even it would make her a sale.  It was a bitter greed that made Kay smile so rarely. And her greed was noticed and resented by all who worked for her. They did not respect her for it and some of her workers stole from her to compensate for being treated as inferior and underpaid.
         I loved some aspects of her bookstore and learned allot from some of the employees there. I didn't mind that Kay carried "mature" material as well, magazines of the x-rated variety. That was something g of an education, to see so many varieties of pornography. I have nothing against nudity, but do object to sexual exploitation. But I was more surprised and disgusted that so many men have a fetish for guns, battleships and military history books. Kay had a whole section of this rubbish and men, always men, right wing men, would come in and gloat over the guns and killing machines, tanks and ammo in magazines like 'Soldiers of Fortune' or 'Guns and Ammo'. The people that came to look at the "girlie magazines" were harmless and inoffensive by comparison.
        I liked the literature and philosophy sections, especially. What was really great about Kay's bookstore was its used books. She had everything. I often came across real jewels of works I have never seen.  It was a good job for a poet and allowed me to be around ideas and books all day long. I learned to value world culture and world art and poetry there. It is where I learned most about world poetry for instance. This is reflected in scholarly and intellectual drawings like Meditations: the Young Philosopher, Knowledge or Evolution and the Limits of Language or the Fall: tragic Veil. I did some of these drawings when i was working at Kay's.
      The bookstore itself was unusual and full of eccentric characters. For instance the oldest worker was a man named Harry who was very fat and badly dressed but who spoke a very fine and elegant English. He was gay and had a young man who was not altogether right in the head who came to see him to ask him for money. The young man thought that there were conspiracies everywhere. He imagined the license plates on the cars in the street had secret messages to tell him. There another man, Gary, who did marvelous cartoons for a comic book series by Harvey Pekar, called American Splendor, as well as a very intelligent, budding songwriter and would-be rock star, and a born again Christian. These people were all colorful and sad, full of dreams that very likely might not come to pass. I was certainly no better than any of them. My dreams, written down at night in poems or meticulously drawn in notebooks, also might come to nothing or shatter like glass.
       I enjoy people, indeed, I prefer people who are not quite "normal" and none of the people who worked at  Kay's were quite normal.. Normalcy involves a certain lack of imagination, a certain unthinking allegiance to mass marketed gossip, corporate culture, the catholic church or other meddlesome and conformist watchers of social acceptability. Life is sad, and from one day to the next, I am often surprised that we go on and continue with things. Being surrounded by all those old books made me think the world has gone on in its haphazard way for centuries, but yet something of all the trouble and sorrow remains, and somewhere in all the seeking and knowledge there ought to be some understanding of the mystery of life, a slight smile on the corner of the mouth of history, even as Rembrandt late self portrait shows him laughing, a hearty laugh that is full of tragic humor. Rembrandt's laughing self portrait is supposedly based on a story or myth about Zeuxis, a painter who painted old women  who died when he laughed so loud he choked on some food. But  I have wondered if the picture actually portrays Diogenes the Cynic, the one who told Emperor Alexander to stand out of his sunshine. "Get out of my sunshinel" he is supposed to have said to the conqueror, disrespectfully.  Such a man, who respects no power, has the right to a hearty laugh and my admiration.

 

( perhaps it would have been more accurate to draw the book being born like fruit form the tree rather than the tree from the book!!)

I was wonderful to be with all the books everyday. Bookstores like Kay's, independently owned and run, had amazing diversity. The corporate bookstore has largely eliminated these wonderful Mom and Pop stores. Now that the computer seems to be supplanting the need of books, it is a loss all around. I can think back to favorite bookstores in various cities around the country and the world. Bookstores like Foley's  in London, Shakespeare's in Paris, in City Lights and Cody's San Francisco and many small bookstores in New York. Kay's books was one of the best I had ever been in, for all its funky mustiness and chaos, or perhaps because of its excellence in the midst of funky chaos.

           There is something intimate and friendly about books, something that calls forth a certain care and charm for intimate human objects, like old shoes, baby clothes an old man's pipe or a woman's favorite purse. Good Books are like dolls or children's toys, well worn jewelry or ones favorite pottery. The book has a marvelous hand held intimacy that one takes into ones eyes and shares with the author her or his most special and personal reflections. Not all books do this, obviously, some books are not worth the paper they are printed on, but some stretch the imagination to the stars, or bring one down into the deepest sorrows, and some merely recount facts of no interest.  But I loved all those used books, with their worn spines, and their musty smell, and the dust of ages on their bookends.  Books were like a tree that I climbed from branch to branch and book to book, like a bird flying from limb to limb or from rivers to hills.

         It was a good job for a while. I would come home and make myself some simple dinner and work on my drawings or my poems. I was full of 'high' purpose in a world that neither shared my interests or cared if I cared about a better world worth living in. I was very lonely in those days as the woman I was then involved with lived in New York City and I disliked New York and did not wish to live there again. She would come to see me periodically and I would go to see her, ecstatic to go meet her at the airport periodically. She ended up moving back to where I lived for a time.

I left Kay's books eventually for various reasons.  It wasn't just a feeling of suffocating in a house of books. There were other pressing reasons. A man who worked in the store decided he did not like me and came up behind me one day with a nose and put it around my neck laughing. Another day he ran a razor blade up and own my arm, threatening to cut me. I got the message. This drawing was done around the time that I left the bookstore. The clock and screaming hands above the house of books in the drawing probably express some terror in the house of books, some feeling that I am wasting my life and must learn elsewhere. It was not an entirely safe place to work.  I had to get out. The world of books is not the world in which books are sold. I was living in a world of poetry and rare knowledge and the bookstore where I worked harbored one person who did not have my well being in view. It was easier to leave the bookstore than to try to fight that particular individual and his malice. It is not the first time in my life I inspired hated in an unbalanced individual. He wanted me to quit and threatened me with a razor blade, which he ran up my arm, and suggested it might be well if I left. Another day he put a hangman's noose around my neck. I obliged him. What else was I to do? I was suffocating the the house of books. I left the bookstore carrying Plato's writings with me as I went out the door the last time. It was a fateful book I left with. I did not realize then that that book would haunt the next 10 years until I finally renounced Plato.

House of Books

         I  was often frightened in those days, frightened yet longing for a freedom that I did not yet understand. How could I not be? I was a sensitive and feeling person living in a world that does not care about much of anything except money and power.  Money has never held my interest much. My concern was doing my creative work. I was restless with a need to know. I knew that what I needed to know was not going to be taught to me in a university. I wanted to find out what the world was and how it worked.   This rather Kafkaesque vision, in the above drawing, of a man trying to find comfort from fear in a tiny cell or cave of books offers a psychological truth. Above the drawing I have written the words "St. Anthony". This is not a drawing of Anthony, but I was commenting on the man in this drawing seeking refuge in the realm abstractions as Anthony did. Books were a defense, I hoped, against the power of the world to exploit me. It is true that gods can be a defense too. There is reason to believe that gods are entirely the fiction of makers of books.  Or rather the priests had the books, or in some tribes the lore, the oral histories and oral traditions, and these fictions are fed to the illiterate to keep them content with their quiet suffering. Religion was and is mostly palliative stories spoken down to ignorant children to pacify their fears. Sometimes after the Gutenberg revolution, books ceased to be accessible only to the ruling classes, and religion begins to fail. So it is not books that were the problem behind religion, but rather the control of knowledge by elite classes. Inexpensive books, and the whole process of gathering accurate information, were primary in overthrowing Catholic dogma and domination in Europe. So in this sense, books are liberation, insofar as they represent an effort oto be objective and socailly conscious. But insofar as books are symbols of dogma or holy writ, literal interpretation or "revealed truth", they are something retrogressive, harmful, and imprisoning. The St. Anthony myth in the above drawign is thus employed ironically. I wanted to break out of the house of books. But I did not yet know how to do it. I lef tht bookstore carrying a copy of Plato's works. I was not aware that this was another trap or prison that I would not get out of for ten years.

       During the years where I explored religion I was not content with quietly suffering for the sake of a god who was merely a puffed up pretender. But I did not have enough education yet to understand how dogmas form and who they serve. I did feel, despite my love of them, that sometimes I disliked books and wanted to escape from them. Books are necessarily time bound. That is what gives them their dusty vanity, their musty, leather-worn feeling of death and decay. Even books that claim to have escaped time have not done so, and even their spines show wear. There is no eternal book: there are only deceitful tomes. There are reasons to want to be free of books, free of abstract prisons of thought, free of endlessly thinking about what has no solution. To hold on to what is real and get out of the imaginations of others. Too much time in books and around ideas and I want to give myself back to green flow of life, to flowers and birds and my body's life and the life of seeing and reaching, eating and walking.
         But there are other times where I needed books badly. I needed and loved books in some parts of my life more than I loved human beings. I did not know how else to try to find a way out of my sorrows unless it was to appeal to the dead people inside books. Someone must have learned something in this life of ours. Of course, books are still about people. So I guess I was not denying humanity so much as I was seeking answers from the dead, because the living were unable or unwilling to help me. I often wish I could walk up to people and say, "what do you think about the fact of your aging, how does that feel to you?" or, "how do you feel about death"? --- But there are few people one can get close enough to to ask really deep and personal questions. So there have been times where I was desperate for books and believed I would only be able survive the harsh selfishness of a world that does not care about me if I can learn enough to defend myself.  Knowledge is not power, as Francis Bacon said, but rather a way to stave off power: to defend myself against abusive powers, to find a way to live a life of truth and care.  Books will protect me from harm, I believed.  I really believed in those days that books could offer me a way to find a truth and  certainty that were real and permanent. This was naive of course. They have led me to some truths. but not to "Truth". There is no "Truth". Yet still I am reading everyday, hoping to learn, seeking answers, asking questions. Life is questions.
        On the one hand, like Don Quixote, I had read too many books and that had made me a little crazy in the head. I didn't think that windmills were dragons, literally, but I did believe many of the myths that I had been brought up with, some of which are not as harmless as windmills. I was led by books into a number of delusions, mistaken beliefs which encouraged me to follow various beautiful lies. I was as zealous in my folly as Don Quixote. It is better to be fat and skeptical, like Sancho Panza, perhaps. So I am becoming in my old age. But just as Books would deceive me in some cases, on the other hand they also helped me out over the years. Knowledge can benefit and it can do harm. Knowledge is not an unalloyed good, nor is it an unalloyed bad.
        But that said, I still love books, even if I sometimes accuse or doubt them. In the core of me I think that education is paramount in life. Teaching my child is the deepest gift I can give her. Her education will protect here and guide her on her way. I cannot exactly remember when I started loving loving books and caring so much about education. My mother, probably, taught me to love books before I was born. She was a great lover of both books and education. Smart woman.  When I was a kid, there were lots of books around the house. She did not hesitate to offer to buy me any book I expressed interest in. I remember at age 10 or so getting  the Time/Life series of books about planets and the universe, and then biology and evolution, birds, and animal behavior and then others. I was full of curiosity about the world I lived in, and followed my wonder from one subject to another, heedless of the artificial categories they taught me in school.

His Flowering Book

My earliest interest was in nature and I loved thinking about the starry sky and the planets, and forests and animals. I remember writing a paper about Salmon  in 4th grade and doing a drawing of Salmon leaping up a waterfall. And I made a wooden Condor out of plywood and I painted it in the colors of the Condor. Probably in 5th or 6th grade. In 7th grade I probably read my first full length novel, Jack London's White Fang. It was a great book that kept me in its enchantment for weeks. Little did I know that its pages describing the cruelty of life would turn out to be so true.

         The other full length book that I read was The Journals of Lewis and Clark and that fired my imagination and rekindled my love for  western North America, where I spent my childhood. All those visions of endless Buffalo and Pronghorn, and wildflowers brimming across the Prairie and Indians living in a world as yet unharmed. I loved imagining the world of waterfalls and crystal mountains and the Big River---the Columbia--- going down to the Pacific Ocean.
         My interest in reading as a way of experiencing the wider world around me grew into my teens. A 6th grade teacher whose beauty, shapely breasts and sexual appeal increased my willingness to listen to her got me reading Edgar Poe. By 10th grade I moved form Poe to Coleridge and the romantic poets, from Shelley to Baudelaire. I was then given many of philosophy,  literary and cultural  books that had belonged to my epileptic uncle Jack, who was a journalist but whose illness compromised his employability and who spent his last years studying philosophy and culture. He had a very incisive mind and marked his books as he read so, in a way, i read along with him as I read his books. There was Dante's  Divine Comedy and Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, William James Varieties of Religious Experience and many others. Jack became my main role model. His books opened up entire areas of interest. I speak of Jack in more detail in other writings.
        I suppose if I have anyone to thank for a sense of wonder and a love of knowledge and books it is my mother and her brother Jack. They themselves were inspired by their mother and grandfather, as their mother, Edna Gormley, was quite a fiery and independent woman for the time, and their grandfather was a very forward seeing friend of African American people who wrote a wonderful book int he 1930's called Who is Who In Colored America ( Thomas Yenzer,1933-1947). I learned very little from my father's family, since all they seemed to care about was making money, taking advantage of others and climbing the unjust ladder of corporate 'success'. More than once I have considered changing my name to Gormley. Mark Gormley. yes, it sounds much better than Koslow.
        So, my mother, my uncle, and my great-grandfather taught me the importance of books.  But they did not teach me to fear what books can and cannot teach. My mother read partly to be informed but largely for entertainment. Nothing wrong with reading a good novel. But especially after my father died in 1973, she increasingly used books as an adjunct to a need to escape from her grief and disappointment in life. Books became a kind of alcohol, a drug. In moderation I have no objection to that either. But she was sometimes immoderate in such uses, especially and her later years before her dementia took over. I did not want to use books for such a means and in general have preferred non-fiction to fiction, though there are fictional works I have deeply loved.
         But certainly I did use books to compensate for losses and sorrows in my life. In my teens, between 14 and 18, I was extremely lonely and books became a way of having friends and conversation. They kept my mind and curiosity alive. I so much longed for a real teacher I could taste it. But my teachers at school were not very good. Books offered me imaginary friends. One of the the friends I had was Vincent Van Gogh, who was also a very lonely man. I read his letters with some recognition of my own state. I loved  the Vincent  of the letters and paintings and retain a feeling of sympathy and intimate respect for him and his work today. I also read a physically huge book about Da Vinci in high school. It took me months to read parts of it by going to the library at school and reading it in installments. A few pages everyday. I studied Da Vinci's notebooks too. Leonardo was not a warm hearted man as was Vincent, but his love of knowledge and nature impressed me. I felt like I could swim in his notebooks, and identified with his far ranging curiosity, as I have discussed above.
         I love art books and would bring home great, heavy stacks of them from the library--- Chinese or Hindu art, the Pre- Raphaelites, Honore Daumier, the strange artist Gregory Gillespie, Monet, El Greco or others no one has heard of. I also studied Rembrandt deeply in my teens.  I found a book of drawings by him( at Kay's books, incidentally, some years before I worked there). It was a beautiful book with allot of room on the page besides the drawings. I copied passages from the sayings of Christ that the drawing illustrated, and sent the book to a girl who I thought I was in love with. She didn't value my effort very much. But it was in any case a work of love, justified for its own sake, as this book I am now making is also justified. And in any case, the weeks of immersion in the marvelous humanistic drawings of Rembrandt made it well worth it. No one ever told a story with so few and such well drawn lines as Rembrandt's marvelous drawings. I sometimes think that if the wonderful Christianity of the early social realist paintings of Van Gogh and and the drawings and the paintings of Rembrandt were the sum total of what Christianity were about, I might not have left religion behind me. But Christianity has done too much harm for me to to believe its myths. The fact is that Rembrandt's humanistic compassion goes well beyond the limits of an archaic and ossified religious institution. It might be said that Rembrandt is great despite his unfortunate religion. And Van Gogh himself eventually saw through the harmfulness of Christianity and abandoned it. Vincent's early career as a preacher in the coal mines of Borniage could not have been sustained, since such preachers were merely  'pie-in-the-sky' apologists for the injustices of a very cruel capitalism. Vincent ended as a poetic and secular socialist with deep feelings for nature.
        Christian priests did not invent  religious war but they perfected it, sharpening swords against the bones of "pagans" of the Roman empire, smashing "pagan"  temples, burning their books, including, in particular, the Library of Alexandria. There were calls for the  elimination of all non-Christians from the Roman empire following Justinian’s edict of 529.The Christian killing of those who were different continued through the perfidy of the Crusades and up to the present in foolish wars stared by a sadistic American president named Bush.  The hatred of anything outside the bible has obsessed Christians for centuries and the burning of the Library in Alexandria was just the first of centuries of Inquisition, book burnings and efforts to censor and control minds. Even today American Christians seek to eliminate knowledge that conflicts with the absurd superstitions of the fictional tale they call the bible.
          Seeking in many different kinds of books, was an early passion. Even before my father died, when I was 17, I felt a huge chasm open in me concerning the times I lived in and what I was to do with my life. The urgent need to understand the world and life drove me into books and into philosophy. I was skeptical about religion and liked what the American philosopher John Dewey said about religion being an effort to explain away the uncertainty and precariousness of life. Religion offered a false security, an 'opium" for the people as Marx put it. But the fascination of the religion was too tempting and its opium's were exciting in the early 1970's when the hippie movement and the Beatles had made eastern religions fashionable.
        I did not know how to face my father's death. His death widened the chasm of my confusion even further. Nor did I know how to face my mother's grief. But necessity had thrown me into the situation and I had no choice but to do the best that i could. I was my mother's primary caretaker after her husband died, and she wanted to die too. How was I to keep my mother alive and deal with my father's death as well as with the adolescent confusions of my age, all at the same time? I think I probably made tentative compromises with religion because I needed it so that I could tell my mother stories to keep her from killing herself.  So, I think I was already put in a deep conflict about what religion was and what validity it might have at age17. At 17 my father was dead, and my mother was insane with grief and I was left alone to try to sort it out. My mother's life depended on it, as she was often wildly, drunkenly suicidal.  My mind told me that religion was a lie, my pain told me that I had to believe it to comfort others. I kept my mother alive, when really what she wanted was to throw herself on a burning pyre, literally, and she often said this, exactly.
        There was no one there to help me deal with my own grief. So, books were a great comfort to me as well as a source of ideas and insights about possible ways to deal with the issues life had put before me. Thus, my love affair with books was always nuanced with sorrows and searches, seeking for alleviation of that which harmed me and those I loved.  "In much wisdom there is much sorrow" someone said.  I was not old enough to be wise. But I was old enough to seek knowledge and to be sad in the search. Hence the following drawing, which shows a character, more or less a self portrait, on the verge of weeping, or perhaps sad beyond the ability to weep. But it is not just me. It is someone who is seeking and not finding, seeking and not finding..... It could be anybody....
 

  

         Being constantly around books in years of study can make one one sick of knowledge, at least for a time.  After I had worked in the bookstore many months and then spent years studying philosophy and religion books sometimes seemed to be all about vanity. I was trying to learn the truth and was unable to do so.  I clicked into hat whole tradition of thinking the world is "vanity", without questioning that tradition at all. The above drawing is a kind of "Memento Mori" such as one sees in grim Christian, Dutch  still lives from the 16th and 17th centuries. These paintings try to state in different ways that you should "remember that you will die", and so show wormy fruit, dying flowers, hourglass sand timers, oil lamps, watches and other objects are used as symbols meant to remind the viewer of the transitory nature of human life. They try to make the viewer feel remorse for sexual appetite ,greed or over eating. One is supposed to look at the these paintings and want a more spiritual life, rejecting the "world" and the "flesh" in preparation for an imaginary afterlife. This drawing does not go that far. But it suggests a weariness with knowledge or the search for knowledge. It is, as it were, my personal Ecclesiastes. " All is Vanity" the preacher is supposed to have said.  In this drawings I was using some of the symbols of the Momento Mori tradition to suggest my weariness. There is not much time in life,  and it is true that you had better decide how you are to live before someone lese decides for you. All is not "vanity", one must beware of that kind of despair: death and gods are delusions. It is not true that all is vanity. There is no afterlife and flowers are not symbols of decay and and watches symbolize time passing but that does not mean that Christianity or any other religion is true. Existence is not vanity: religious superstitions and myths are what is vain. There are many reasons not to despair, not least of which is the beauty of sunlight, the wonder of nature, the depths of space and the marvel of existing. Even if I have at times been weary of learning and books, I still know life is life and I affirm it, in sprite of its difficult moments of suffering. There is only ourselves and our bodies. Loving our earth and our bodies upon it is sometimes hard, but that is all there is.
      In fact, one of my first oil paintings, now lost, was a Still Life of a small pile of books ( I remember two of the books, one was Experience and Nature by John Dewey and the other was the selected writings of Bertrand Russell) and a birds nest ( an oriole's nest, to be exact) and the nest and books were placed before a wooden carving of a covered wagon rolling westward.. The symbolism of this early painting is rather the opposite of what is pictured in the drawing above. When I was 16 and books seemed to me to be the key and source of hope to allowing me to return to my beloved California. Life was not "vanity". I was not painting a momento mori but a Momento Viva, as it were, a remembrance of life. That hope was partly if not entirely realized in later years. Books would be my nest, and I would be born like a little bird out of heavy volumes of Poetry and  Philosophy. There is even some truth in this: books did eventually help teach me a way of looking at the world that was my own. They taught me not shrink from critical thinking. They taught me that I didn't need books but could use them if I needed to and even love them if I must, but to love life first, if possible.
         In contrast, when I did the drawing above I was weary of working with books and weary of study and was longing to go out and see more of the real world. And not long after doing this drawing I made a trip to Europe and went again to live in New York City for awhile. New journeys always seemed to bring me into proximity to new books, almost as if books were stairways or steps along a road in life. It seemed to me that one was only ready to read a given book once one had been prepared to read it. One abandoned that book or that author as one outgrew those concerns. Few authors are there indeed that survive a lifetime of interest.
      On the other hand there are books that one comes across on the road of life that lead one astray, into confusion or do one damage. One should not have read them and misery could have been avoided. Fateful books come ones way that turn ones mind in a direction that counters who one truly is----books that preach harmful beliefs, or advocate for human tendencies that are destructive.  "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and the millions of variants of this book teach people how to put it over on others, to lie and sell things that are better not sold or bought. Mein Kampf: Machiavelli; The Art of War being notable examples.  There were books that did me real harm and I am sorry I ever read them, such as the writings of the traditionalist Rene Guenon and his followers. I thought there was some truth to their writings at first, but found out that they were little more than far right cultists. But I learned from them painful lessons about how unjust systems of knowledge operate, how dogmas distort human behavior and how people become ignorant and malicious when in certain groups, cults or religious organizations.
         I had a different experience reading Nietzsche in art school. His work intoxicated me for some weeks or perhaps a month. Zarathustra was very exciting, both its language and its wild excess of sunlight and feelings of power and strength. But I eventually figured out how racist and human centered it was and lost interest in it. The "overman," was merely another puffed up fiction with Germanic delusions of grandeur.  I would later learn about Fichte's "universal ego" and Schuon's claim to be the last prophet at the end of time, and realize what folly was the will to power and the caste ridden desire to be above everyone and everything. But I agree with Nietzsche that "To do wrong to the earth is now the most awful  thing"
         We fortunately live in a society that cannot ban books. Plato wanted to ban books and poets from his fascist and caste ridden Republic. The Catholic Church and the Stalinist empire were fond of  banning books and killing authors. Republicans and McCarthyites in the U.S. are continually trying to censor books. I certainly do not believe in denying free speech or free expression, and even harmful books need to be available, but there also needs to be free and fair systems of education to make sure that people are able to assess the harm such books can do. There  books that fuel hate, racism, envy or greed. Some books lead one astray and offer phony esoteric secrets, but when one goes down the path toward the fountain they promise, alas, the fountain is empty, filled with sand, and the hard work of seeking to get there through the texts and symbols is for nothing. One has been duped, as in the drawing below.
     

 

          Here is a drawing that pictures the road taken down the highway of symbols that lead into the land of cults and religion and systems of ignorance superstition and social engineering. How beautiful the runes, arcane letters and esoteric scripts look. To know secret languages makes one feel elite and chosen. But such esoteric elitism leads to corrupt societies of people who believe thy are more special that others and those who are outsiders are "profane" or  scum. Form there it is a short step toward shunning ostracism, inquisitorial suppression of rights, abuse of women or children, minorities or indigenous people and then murder.
        I was just looking at the books in my bookcase and see the sad fact of years gone by that I will never recover again. There is Rilke's collected poems, who I loved deeply once and love no more. How my heart flew in the azure heights and immanent depths of Rilke's metaphysical fictions!! All that narcissistic "within, within, within", as if the poor did not matter and only Buddhist or orientalist escape into the immanent was the answer. I gave up Rilke's secular religion years ago. But what beauty there was in this youthful idealism! So much fullness of feeling about dying early as a martyr to poetry. What aesthetic narcissism it all was. Yes, it could be said that Rilke is a sort of midwife to the Philosophical drawings----Rilke's Duino Elegies, the most religious secular poems every written, along with Jack Hirschman with maybe a little Beckett, Van Gogh, Klee and Da Vinci thrown in too. Not many people see the humor that is in some of these drawings, but no matter. Next to my long neglected collected poems of Rilke is the Mustard Seed Garden, a Chinese painting manual, which I no longer need, but sometimes look at and keep because it is interesting to see how the Chinese stylized nature's infinite variety. There is Shelley and Yeats, Joyce and Plato. There are so many books that occupied me deeply for some many diverse reasons in the past. I cannot recover those enthusiasms now. I have changed with my books over the years, each book evoking a different part of myself from the long ago. Parts of my old self, as if each book were a leaf fallen from the tree of my life, a stairway leading somewhere that seemed too far then, but now is a town I left far behind.

        Reading is an activity that encloses one in a lovely, private world of the mind and imagination. It is not necessarily an escape from reality. Of course there are situations in life that one legitimately would can wish to escape from. Tyrannical parents, a bad job or bad employers, war, poverty,  prison, grief, sickness, boredom are all good reasons to want to escape for awhile into a book. I used books in high school as a means of travel. I needed to get away from the town I lived in, the loneliness of days, the long hours of friendless sorrow, sitting in classes being taught things I already knew or did not care about--- a family that showed little concern for me or eachother. I used books to try to understand why I lived in a world made in such as way, governed by people whose main motives seemed to be to compete or bring defeat or shame to other people----people who wanted to see other people suffer and have less than them--- people who thought that refusing to give to others and having more than poorer people made them virtuous. What kind of world makes a hero of penny-pinching millionaires who give nothing to anyone, or whose gifts merely reinforce the poverty that they themselves created? What kind of world puts selfish and cruel financiers and business men in positions of power ruling democratic governments? The greedy, "cost-benefit" mentality of merchants is not the mentality one wants running a government or any other reasonable organization. People who hurt others to make millions are criminals..
      I was trying to find a way out of capitalism, a way out of a destructive economy of "self interest" that excused cruelty by invoking the lie of "necessity". It is never necessary that one has to exploit or cheat others. My father believed that one cannot "change the evil in the world" and that therefore one had to join the evil and profit from it. I longed for a world where good people would not excuse harm done to others or to nature on the basis that " I was just doing my job". I would not worship as my father had, the "Bitch Goddess success" as William James called it. Of course, James is not entirely blameless in his philosophy, which does sometime support the goddess he decries. In any case, I read James and The Logical Positivists and other economic thinkers who tried to justify capitalism. I tried to keep myself at least somewhat informed about those who justified things that were harmful to others. Thus, at times, I have read books not because I loved them, but because it was necessary to study that which does harm, of those thinkers or histories that have caused suffering for myself of others. Sometimes one reads to shore oneself up against ruin and hurt. Sometimes one studies the enemy. Sometimes, one needs to know enough to try to outsmart the many con-men who have most of the power in the world. Book are an important source of resistance to power and injustice. Democracy fails without access to as much freedom of information as possible. I finally came to understand that books and knowledge are important not as a means of preserving power, but as a means of seeking to limit, curtail, resist and restrain powers. Some books are needed to tell the truth about power, analyze the charlatans, expose the liars and unmask those who take from the small and the poor.
      Some books seemed to offer a world that did not make a virtue of capitalistic selfishness. I longed to see other lands, know how other people thought, understand other peoples gods, other arts and cultures. I longed for a community of people who cared about each other, a family that did not undermine and destroy each others pursuits as my family had done. Short of that. I sought friends in books, and thought that books provided an intimacy that might help me when I was older and could meet companions who would provide me with deeper intimacies.

 

        This drawing, a section of a lager drawing below it, tries to show the immersion in the  pleasure and luminous wonder of books. There really is a "pleasure of the text", as Roland Barthes called it. It is a pleasure of the mind that sends itself out into the body on the one hand and into the imaginary world the book creates, on the other. Its an extraordinary thing to enter in the world of someone else through writing. It is almost like making love, but it is mental and emotional, rather than physical. In this drawing the book seems almost to create the face of the man that rises or hovers over the opened book. Indeed, books help create and sustain one's inner self, the light of ones eyes. I wonder when I did this drawing if I thought of  the man as the creation of the book, or is he so enraptured by the book that he flows in and out of its pages? Or is it the author himself  or the reader who is dreaming above or evoked by the luminous pages.
       What is one's identity when one reads a book? Does one become the others who are in the book? David Copperfield becomes part of one's own ego. One runs with Oliver Twist through the streets of London and escapes Aunt Polly with Tom Sawyer or goes down the river with Huck Finn and the slave Jim.  Is that why the pleasure of a book can be so satisfying, almost as if one made love with another mind, becoming that which one loves? Books can englobe one in another world, that is certain, becoming a brother to the Karamozovs or walking Fairhaven Hill with Henry Thoreau. One can become carried away into a place very different than where the body might happen to be sitting and reading, and from there one can imagine wonderful conversations, amazing feats and wide vistas. It is amazing how some books sing in my heart for years or decades. Thoreau has carried my heart and mind into beautiful ecstasies in this way, even recently. So has Neruda. Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire is one of the best nature books ever written.. Barry Lopez has written some fine things. I went Sailing on Mutiny on the Bounty and went into the sewer under Paris with Jean Valjean. Rimbaud took me to a hell in my mind and Beckett brought me into a sad self recollection of my own lost and seeking humanity. One of my favorite books does nothing more than describe a hummingbird that was caught up north over the course of a cold winter, and the author lived with the bird in her indoor garden. Another favorite book describes life with a Blue Jay. I especially love books that try to tell the truth about experiences.
     Some books live inside one for years, and some live only briefly. Once upon a time Rilke, Tagore and Rumi transported me in ecstasies. But now when I read them I no longer find them alluring. Once I loved Edgar Poe but now do not enjoy reading him. It is hard to define why some books hold ones heart for years and other books lose their luster quickly. It my teens I loved both King Lear and Dante, but now I find Dante ridiculous but still love Lear and his fool. I still love Samuel Beckett, even if he saddens me deeply. I still like Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago. Once I loved Emerson, but now I no longer read him. There are many old books  of mine on dusty shelves, unread for years.
 

In books, one can feel feelings not belonging to oneself and see pictures that others saw with their eyes. One can walk in the shoes of others and hear with their ears. Books can open up whole new ways of seeing and loving our world. They train the imagination, and the imagination can learn to feel its way into the world of other minds and other places. One can travel to other times, enter into the poems of other hearts, feel the feet walking of those who crossed mountains, touch the clouds with birds of the rain forests, go into the deserts of China and Africa, feel with the suffering of Haitian Sugar cane cutters, go back into the history of Egypt or sit in a sad cafe with poor men and women. One can explore the history of ones own town or city or family, if anyone in one's family wrote books or kept letters or left accounts of oral history or genealogy. The world is an archive of wonders and nature lives in a sympathetic offering of those patient enough to listen to its knowledge.

       The whole world is a story. We are made of stories on the genetic level. Life on earth has an imagination. One of the Philosophical drawings that expresses this relation of books to the imagination-- the relation of thinker to other thinkers is this one, called The Woven Mind.  It is not just about reading but about the interpenetration of minds. Books interlace one mind to another, entwine insights, like music, finding harmony in discords, creating spaces and new vistas, carrying a hope for a better future to other minds far distant.
       This drawing is very interesting for the way it uses line as a musical instrument to play themes into each other. The light dances through the line and radiates like gold thread, stitching heads and minds into patterns of interaction and intuitive insight. Rhythms and mazes, Irish knots and and galaxies are set against each other and mutually interlace in patterns of reciprocal influence.

The Woven Mind

 

        Word wheels spin worlds. A man at the bottom reaches down out of waves of vegetation and sunlight and stars shinning to hold out a rose and an insect in each hand. There are images of self -devouring as well as speaking out of the bodies of others, or bodies coming out of other's mouths or ears as if speaking creates bodies. Faces multiply and become other faces. The man in the middle reaches forth from an egg-like oval in an ecstatic gesture.

        The drawing is full of strange and interesting detail. The full meaning of it I leave to the reader. But the title is important. How does the mind arise form nature?. Even Paramecium appear to have some ability to make decisions and thin in a rudimentary way. How does the mind arise in nature? How did the ability to reason and think, or feel and speak, come into being?

         Parts of this drawing are about the love poet's have for other poet's, for instance, or the tender love that readers can feel for their own favorite author. There is nothing quite like having an author one cares about, as Walt Whitman is easy to care about in this way, and I have carried around his Leaves of Grass for years now. His Song of Myself is a book that holds ones hand. I carry around Thoreau even closer to my heart. His books literally live inside me and sometimes I feel he looks out of my eyes. I don't feel Henry as closely, perhaps, as books live inside the characters at the end of Ray Bradbury's  Fahrenheit 451 Those characters have memorized entire books in a future society that burns all its books. But nevertheless, Henry is a dear author to me, who I love. I have loved other authors too, such as Allen Ginsberg, Van Gogh or authors who are less well known, but who are are friends such as Cody Maher and Jack Hirschman. Hints of Van Gogh, Da Vinci, Hirschman and Maher can be found in various drawings.

        Of course not all books inspire close relations or seek to bring peace or good in the world. And the drawing above is not entirely uplifting in its presentation of the relation of one mind to another or one way of thought to another. Particularly on the upper right side of the drawing I try to picture how books can be like prisons in which one lives in thoughts of another like a prisoner. There are people who want to control others by means of systems of thoughts. Mind control or systems of dictated dogma and cultic behavioral modification certainly exist, in varying degrees of insistence and infringement on personalities.
       The Catholic Church with its Inquisitions and Witch Hunts and destruction of other cultures by missions and use of slaves was one such system.  Mao's Little Red Book certainly dominated China for half a century, and as it were "stitched" one mind to another, but probably no other book except the Bible or the Koran was directly or indirectly responsible for helping so many millions to their deaths. There are books that kill or that encourage killing, like the writings of Stalin, the Koran, Bible and Bhagavad-Gita.   It would be well if such books were retired from the religion section and were catalogued as in the history of atrocity section, fantasy literature, fiction or war novels instead.

        There are various drawings that explore the relation of books to community, citizens in the community or the communities of the thoughtful to one another. Here are four such drawings.


 

Entangeled in Breathing and Giving Birth to a new sky

The Philosophers

Knowledge

The Earth

Ill discuss them separately in what follows:

 

 

1. In the first drawing called "Entangled in Breathing"  what might be called the community of citizens and lovers is pictured as an utopian vision in the sky. The man below, clearly suffering, is trying to envision a world that might be worth living in. I did this drawing in Paris, perhaps inspired by seeing Delacroix's great Liberty Leading the People, which really impressed me. This drawing is not a reference to Delacroix, but it does have a feeling that recalls the excitement of hope in the various revolutions of Russia, China, America and France, all of which were more or less ruined by those hungry for money or power.
         There is in this drawings a strange effort to give birth by a man. This is an old fantasy of mine, and no doubt of many men. The inability of men to give birth is tragic in some ways, leading them to wish to compensate by creating empires, skyscrapers and all sorts institutions, men's clubs and power structures the world would be much better without. The desire to give birth is here seen as a positive thing, however, and what is envisioned is not power but a society of friends and lovers.
         I think however, that there is a regrettable and unexamined gnosticism in the drawing, evident in the expression "entangled in breathing".( I use this term here pejoratively, to mean a theory of knowledge that is anti-nature) Breathing is not entangling, unless of course, one cannot breathe, and in that case, one might be dying. But here I think the meaning is "spiritual", which is to say, that I was trying to express the idea of a realm where breathing is not necessary. There is no such place. Putting my hopes in a sort of separated, discrete, heavenly realm is, of course, an artistic convention, common say, in the paintings of El Greco, whose paintings I admired in those days. The logic of images is such that it is assumed that those who are in heaven are able to breath in some way as yet not understood. The actual breath of those on earth is then seen as some lesser respiration, and thus an "entanglement". This is nonsense of course. There is no heaven where the imaginary dead breathe transcendental breath.. So the premise of the drawing is mistaken. The idealism of  of "giving birth to a new sky" is not we expressed. What I meant was that there is suffering on earth and I should have said that the answer tot hat suffering should be on earth too. No more gnostic paradises, hippie promised lands, spiritual new ages. What we need is a recognition of actual sufferings, real losses, and solutions that grow form an awareness of the facts.


 

 

2. In the second drawing of the" Philosophers", the community is an interlocking relationship among thinkers. It is an interesting figure in the upper left of the philosophers all embracing each other in a concert of arms. In actuality, few humans a more covertly or overtly disdainful towards each other than philosophers. Though exactly what I had in mind is hard to say. I may have been trying to express the closely intertwined nature of philosophical thinking while poking fun at the rather elite and interbred nature of philosophers and their internecine wars with one another. But i do oppose the figure of the intertwined philosophers against the rather lovely woman who is comforting a man--- or it is her child?--- who is made up of other faces, including a death's head. The woman is central and even pivotal. It would seem the entire drawing revolves around her, the giver of life as well as the comforter of those who suffer death.
         In any case, this drawing is not about reality, but about an imagined Manichean conflict of sordid realities posed against dreams of completeness and harmony.  A man with his head removed, in the lower right, gives birth to language, alphabets, numbers and music, or, in short, to all 'knowledge'. The book at the bottom of the drawing rests on top of a severed human head. The figure that grows out of the book is on fire and the fire has engulfed the tree, apparently the tree of knowledge. The man's hands become part of the tree. The symbolism here is very complex, but suggestive of an extreme crisis in knowledge, culture and philosophy. Im sure I meant to convey that. The severed body parts at the top of the drawing suggest Tibetan Buddhist iconography. The drawing has its humorous aspects, but also is deadly serious and implies a strong sense of horror about the history of philosophy. This drawing is one of various drawings that prefigure my concerns in the 1990's with knowledge/power and the relation of knowledge to atrocity. Here the nature of the problems are not spelled out clearly. Ther eis expression of thought as feeling. I was unable to articulate my horror at the 20the century yet. I could only express my feeling about it in forms such as I sue in this drawing.

 

 

3. The 3rd drawing "Knowledge" is also a very complex drawing and shows a pile of burning books after a nuclear war, with a group of people and animals trying to reconstitute a world worth living in after such a horrendous occurrence. The idea here was that scientific and spiritual knowledge betrayed humanity, and that knowledge must somehow be reconstituted in a way that it serves peace instead of power and war. IN the pile of burning books there is an edition of Kant and Descartes as well as Christian and Jewish Texts. The people whoa re trying to rebuild the world, first seem to be devouring each other brains, metaphorically, and then turn towards animals, perhaps finding redemption in the opposite of religion and Platonism, which condemned animals and nature to the lower orders.  But actually, women, animals and nature are what really matters. Maleness is important as an adjunct, procreative and necessary fact, but the whole enterprise of creating disembodied systems of intellectuality is destructive and patriarchal. The brain is offered at the top of the drawing in a lovely gesture to a woman who holds a globe illuminated by the sun. A sense of community is implied in this drawing,, but it is a community that has had to deny aspects of itself, to change and grow into something different than what it was. The border around the drawing is complex and lovely in places and hints at stories, threads, as well as mathematical and geometrical biologics.