|
From my studio notes about #1 April 2010.
I have been for the last five or six months making quick audio notes.
Because I have no particular visual imagery at present, and because
those notes so sum up what the visual imagery would be if it were, I
decided to make a painting of a transcription of the notes. The
painting would give the notes substance, my brief sentences embedded
in matter to last like the Book of Kells embedded the then thousand
year old Scriptures to last
already more than a thousand years since.
I had been reading Vikram Seth's
translations from the Tang poets, and came across his translations
from Du Fu (my favorite Chinese poet when his name was spelled Tu Fu). Seth remarked
that Du Fu's poetry was not famous in his life because he
was not well connected in the capital and always sent to some minor
job in the far away... For that reason, no one thought to collect
his poems until
many years after his death when his name--like Vermeer's--was
resurrected. Thus, although over a thousand of Du Fu's poems were
found, many more were lost. That's why I decided to call
this painting, "From the lost poems of Du Fu"
The text of the poems
follows...
We each must do
what each of us must do in our authenticity.
It is a very
strange and downward trip, but it is that. Do as you did with every
other trip, watch, save, mark, send—watch you, save you, mark you,
send it.
The stuff is all there—the
material—waiting for the summing up.
|
#1 April 2010, From the lost poems of Du Fu
Acrylic on paper with collage.
40 x 27 inches. |
|
Oh how far we’ve
gone, oh how much we’ve done—all the hunger and the hope.
Oh tell us, tell
us how to go; tell us, tell us how to know.
Oh, come with me,
come with me there. Oh, go with you, go with you, go with you where?
You have to make
it past from the here to the summing up. Shit.
For the summing up
before it comes, do it now to know how to do it then. These days with
their piercing light, low sun, long shadows.
Leave me alone to
find my fate. That’s it.
With regard to now
its already later up against a very hard wall.
What will I do,
how will I know, where will I go?
So it goes, night
follows day, and so it does. You cannot keep the lights on all night
long.
What will it be
and how will it go? From where to where, and after there?
They are messages
sent from so long ago to so far to come.
|
Tamalpais, the far peak, the
Indian maiden always calling to the far beyond.
Where will you go,
how will you get there? What will you do, what will you become? There is only one theme there—old age, loss, death. That’s all there
is. Once too much. Now, though, only fading, failing, leaving, gone.
So, you’re dying.
What’s left to make, and who’s left to look. It’s always been a lesson
but there are no hearers any more.
It always tells me
the task, seeing the sunrise. Now I see the sunset.
What to save at
the end when no one wants it, washed away in the sea of time?
How to find in
this world of wreck and ruin, this world of break and no repair, how
to find that which does not, will not, is ever true.
I am afraid of the
dark.
*
And it says as a star at the top,
"LIVE"
And it says in a mark at the
bottom, "ALL GENUINE BY MY SEAL".
|
