August 22, 1981. 
A long, slow, warm, sleepy summer afternoon.  And my shoes are too tight, and my clothes bind, here and there.  And like the old afternoons with Pan among the nymphs and fauns and shepherds in Arcady, I want to take off my clothes and go swimming…

…plunge into the painting, into the red square in the cool, blue water.

Next day (August 23) 
The very most important thing is to be absolutely true to my own experience, the feeling at the very bottom of my own bones, my own flesh.  To the extent I plunge in those summer pools, to plunge into the ones I feel in me, to the extent Pan presides there and that I am satyr, faun, to be true to those images in me… not as shaped 2000 years ago in classical imagery.

So, though I may make Pan, that is not his name; though I may make and be Satyr, Faun, Priapus, that is not his name. Because, his name (their names) whatever they are, are mine, whatever that is.  And their places, too, are mine, carried in the deeps of my body, wherever I am, wherever I go.

What I was trying to say was to distinguish between the signifier (the name Pan) and the signified (the being of Pan), and that the name might be Pan but the being is Fred.

And when the painting was over, it was the river in the evening.

Later.  Either, I am not Priapus, no matter how much I like sex, because invariably when I go down inside myself to be him, I find something else, like this river (of generation, of life); or, Priapus is not in truth like he has come down to us, the rutting stud… twisted out of the sweet flowing stream of grain and sperm into that Victorian devil person, creation of the frustrations and repressions of the Christian era.

I suppose those negatives were necessary at the end of the Roman Empire to eradicate the habit of insatiable lust that seemed to be the cultural norm…but in the process, the negative seemed to destroy all the sweetness of life in the flesh: this whole river of sweet, pure water.  River, spring, waterfall and moon… “moonriver” with setting sun.

August 24, 1981 
So I put in the setting sun, forced, finally to use opaque yellow ochre and to paint the sun engraved as a circle, flowing away lower right.

August 26, 1981.  Morning.
Study the inner lineaments of your body, in the solitude. Alone with the ticking of time.

In the rays of the sun—Every time I start a painting now, the temptation—the desire, the need—to take off my clothes and begin it nude in order to achieve maximum body contact-unity with the origin of the painting—with the stuff of it—grows stronger.

Noon. 
And what I got was a tree stump luminous with life, with a cunt in the roots at the bottom, and a leaf budding within the moon at the top.

Late afternoon. 
Well, I  worked on it, smearing it every way with my fingers with every color of acrylic that I had, and then dripping long white-ish strokes down and across it… and then looking at my cock in the bright sun, as it got hard and huge and came, so that I would know what this painting should look like…

Evening. 
I worked on it some more, and rubbed it all over with the earth brown while spraying in the shadows… and then I scratched into it everywhere, like a little child with the crayons covered over with ink, to see what I would find..  I found the Old Log, and the shining worms swarming all over it.  It has a halo, because the sun is breaking through somewhere in its core.

And when I read all this through after it was over, the astonishing thing was how exactly the first three lines written in the morning had predicted/prescribed the pattern of the day. (And the dark piece across the top is supposed to rain light and water down on the log, to fertilize all that grows in it.)

August 26, 1981

 August 27. 
Looking at the August 26 painting today, observe that

1. Aesthetically, it is quite satisfactory. And that is all there is to that.

During all the years since painting the August 26 painting, I have thought it was not aesthetically satisfactory—but not such a failure as to destroy it.

2. The image is only partly the old log; it is also partly the image of March 17 and March 24, and it is also partly the “Omphalos” at Delphi.  Curiously, the March 17 and March 24 also arose at times, on days of, extreme sexuality. [The March 24 painting has not survived. Click here for the March 17 painting.]

And then, later in the day on August 27, I made another painting.  Looking at both August 26 and 27 together in 2002, they are the perfect opposites of male and female.

August 29, 1981

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