Suddenly happy,
what is
the matter with you?

this five a.m. is cloudless
stars are everywhere
and did I dream
something precious in a
box a girl is holding
and didn’t I say to someone

everything
that has ever lived
is still living

and the ones
who planted the tree
are the very ones
who are eating the fruit

I paint the images and ideas that keep appearing in my mind. I like to ruminate. I don’t answer the phone. Each day around noon I rejoin the external flow. I need some contact, but not too much.

I was born in Chicago in the mid-1900’s. From about the age of two I have been peering into books and standing in front of paintings. I didn’t always understand why artists were doing what they were doing. Confronting art as a teenager in the fifties—I couldn’t see that art for what it was—the blasted fruit of World War II, and a great chasm of grief and confusion now stood between the artist and anything (s)he might attempt to grasp or objectify. Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollack, Franz Kline—kinetic painters feeling their way forward in a broken world.

In the midst of all the angst following the War, in an art environment of Modernism (which was actually over but no one had noticed that yet) my own youthful efforts were somehow most strongly influenced by Western classical art and our innate love of beauty. I could see this beauty mounted like a gem above the stricken world and I could see it recognized and adored in Modigliani, Caravaggio, De LaTour, Corot, Fra Angelico, Botticelli Vermeer, Millet, Rodin, Monet, Maillol, all strewn together in showplaces of culture, like the grave goods of Europa, showing me qualities I could revere in a context of magnificent accomplishment. Most of this through the Art Institute of Chicago and through books.

I met the painter Jack Levine in New York when I was seventeen. He looked at my drawings, romantic figures in chalk. He said “How can this be? It’s as if you’ve skipped over the last thirty years! Where is everything that’s happened? Don’t you care? Is this the new generation?” Of course Levine was a supremely political and socially minded artist; after all he was a product of the Depression. Even so I didn’t seem to make sense in my own place and time. New York in the Sixties. A cynical art establishment offering pop art and Op art and installations, Yoko Ono and her balloons, Warhol, and Rauchenberg, and I was drawing the figure in classical terms and worshiping at Vermeer’s Lacemaker.

Jack Levine’s question—how would the post war generation incorporate, transform and use the experience? It seemed to him that this artist at seventeen had discarded or somehow bypassed the moral disturbances of human actions and sufferings of the years before. Of course if you ask me, I was ahead of my time, and already launched on an inquiry which left behind Modernism and the whole developmental theory of art. I was the generation after the next, post-modern, rejecting progress. Having been born at the end of the World War II, I was entering a global society already dismantled, and so I grew and flourished in that environment of post traumatic shock. In fact, growing up in the Midwest reinforced the sense of anticlimax. My own way of abandoning the Future was to return to the Renaissance.

What I’m trying to say is, the world was already ruined, and so we knew we were living in a moral junk pile from the beginning. Any growth out of this would have to lead us above and beyond the horror and the grief of the twentieth century, because the tragedy of it was a given, and not a catastrophe we were suddenly facing. And looking at the grownups, one saw that they acted as if, or pretended as if, none of those things had ever happened. That puzzled me from the beginning. I saw the contradiction and it made me a twelve year old skeptic, but one with a yearning for something authentic and beautiful. I read Keats and pondered to find the view from which truth and beauty are one. I’ve spent my life in pursuit of this pearl—it’s a difficult concept for me because relative truth is often very ugly.

I love drawing for its uncensored display of an artist’s knowledge and intuition—a pencil drawing of a woman in a striped cape by Watteau demonstrates an entire cosmology and philosophy, and for me at least, produces a feeling of recognition and a happiness that is unexplainable. On a recent trip to New York I visited Rembrandt’s Polish Rider, a painting I am still in love with after many years. Why? This wonderful painting, fluidly brushed by a great master, inspires me with its manifestation of something splendid and noble. How all of this emerges from a sticky slide of oily pigment is a miracle and a teaching. To me this is Rembrandt’s greatest self-portrait. The ones we know, the arrogant Rembrandt with his wine and his woman, or the forlorn, collapsing face of his folding fortunes, the humble Rembrandt, the wise and reverent man, the old, old painter is really this sparkling hero on his wind horse.

Michiana, shore of an inland sea. I’m a sky watcher, I stare into the sky until my eyes stop tearing, I see the blue sun hammering a white sky, rays shooting this way and that, cloudy billows stretching open while on my lazy inner tube I soar, up, up and away, now I’m floating over alabaster palaces, their gates and gardens, I see the kings’ chariots, the proud horses and the sweeping gowns of queens and ladies. I’m five! I’m five! But really I sit in a dimly lit room before this computer and my mind is searching around for some sort of story, wanting to realize something again, in a new way.

The phenomenon of magnetic attraction suggests metaphorically that there is a direction to the movement of my mind. I am lucky to know the solace of art, where great pleasure is to be had, requiring no one and nothing; only light and a place to be left alone, a piece of paper and a pencil.

If my mind stops following after thoughts it spreads out like water, until it encompasses a larger space, and then a larger space. I can spread out across the whole present moment, since I don’t need to pass through it into the next and the next frame, not right away, not yet. I’ll just press pause for a bit.

Spider, your glossy filaments blow lightly in the soft air, each silk thread a prism of colored light, turned by the same breeze that lifts a little band of gnats this way and that. You sit at the center of your web. Jays squawk in the tall trees. Two crows fly over the house. Afternoon light warms the curving boughs of the pear, the eucalyptus, the redwoods, I can hear all the way down to the freeway, it’s nothing but a distant exhalation, like the sea. Neighborhood dogs, workmen, my own breathing, so even and calm, I go with it for a while...

Steel wind chime, your wooden clapper
muffles the music
The yellow cat is peeing in the lily bed
Some of the callas have double stamens they are mutants
Freesia buds are forming and new shoots
crowd winter from the arms of the apricot.
Fallen apples are all sauce under leather skins and
rust sprouts like fur on the pail. Overnight
hundreds of new lemons, and pink camellias
tinged with rot from too much sudden rain.
Green blades knife the soil and I envy the birds
how they sing. If the fly buzzes, it will
attract the cat. The uncut wood is red.
The grapevine, will it ever bear fruit?
Not far a carillon peals,
subtle-bodies of pears and plums
sway in the bare branches.

If I had never seen a tree I could not know a tree by studying a cross section of it. From the tiny outpost of my senses, if I could only see the cross section, I would know nothing of the tree’s grandeur, the product of its seasons, the leaves and branches, fruit or berries, or its interchange with the sun and the rain, I would know nothing of its roots and how it sustains itself, I simply could not know it. My existence and my consciousness with all its content is like a cross section of something the leaves and fruit of which I can’t imagine. That’s why no one can become liberated without recognizing that a tree is not a tree, that I am not-I.

How can the one and the many be identical? A mirror gives an uncensored reflection of the world before it; the sky and trees. If the mirror is shattered, each piece still contains the whole picture, the same sky, the same trees, each fragment still contains the whole. So if I am a sliver of that mirror, I am not the things I think I see in my self; that is only a reflection. I am the mirror and not what passes before me which I reflect. In this sense I am always safe.

Can my mind hold contradictory perceptions at once? A graphic example of this question is the well-known drawing of a young woman in a fur piece, which if you look at it for a while, turns into a face of an old crone; or the wine glass that becomes two silhouettes. Are we perceiving both subjects simultaneously, or does the mind go back and forth, back and forth? However it is accomplished, this “alternating current” is what we have to master to live with completeness. We have to live in the relative world, the world of circumstance and environment, relationship and effort. At the same time we need to exist, think and feel from our deeper being, the part of us which is not available to alteration or compromise. Our life is the dilemma of opposite appearing realities. The trick is to live in both states at once.

All the individual beings are identical at root though we differ in the ways we manifest our being. Numberless threads are weaving and “I” am a thread in the enormous warp and weft. I have always been that thread, I was that thread at the beginning, and before that, long before that. I have always existed and I have lived and died countless times. I can’t remember though. I can barely remember today. Moments stand out in memory distorted and colored by thought. People say, “Where does the time go?”

You and I have always existed. We are part of a perfect whole, and a whole can neither be added to or diminished. We are the ancient original ones, and the ones who are eating the fruit are the very ones who planted the tree.

-- Roberta Weir 2007