Medal

Today I tried to avoid painting where I’d painted the day before. With my arms up I received defensive wounds and a picture emerged with blocks from a kind of layman’s martial art. I have a set of marks, some from left to right, gestures guided away from the instinct of an image to become. This is something born of a Tourette like skirmish in association with grunts.

An insane man flails in the muddy quagmire at the bottom field where all curious bovine's eventually and vainly, perhaps, reach the locked gate of the image. My art cadet training on this assault course brings me a wisdom, though, is the apprentice record to be destroyed or allowed as a badge of merit?

It’s not that I haven’t been here before, but that I arrived here again with a gnosis useful enough to give this unconsciously conscious conception a personal wealth and value. It's also a reminder of how all that we see is an abstraction and that this dead end, as one might call it, is a kind of teleology, like an AA/NA meeting is no more than a transposition of addiction. The art, as it may be for me, as a survival that I can make sense of, is a submission and a caution; images are a symptom of our generic absence of absolutes and sometimes frightening because, like Rilkes Angels, from 'The first Elegy':

Who, if I cried, could hear me among the angelic
orders? And even if one of them impulsively
took me to his heart, I should perish
in his stronger existence. For the beautiful is nothing
but the feared beginning of what we at length endure
and that which we admire is its calm disdain
to destroy us. Each and every angel is terrifying.