Finally, and What Feelings Never Cease Their Iron Grip

Doris Salceda
Untitled (Armoire) 1992



February was the free weekday special at the Museum of Art in Chicago. I visited a few days of every week while I could. It was, rather embarrassingly, my first visit there. The coat check crew grew tired of seeing me very early on.

The first day I couldn't stop for any length of time at all in the late 17th or early 19th century. I needed something else. I wanted to binge on some fleshier work, something coagulated and floundering. So I sought out some of the Ab Ex.

There's a concentrated area wherein Joan Mitchell, De Kooning, Pollack and David Smith all glower at you. Hanging around Ab Ex feels like watching a motorcycle gang from a nervous and timid periphery. They're just really tough. The reputation is true, and I can see what all the lampooning is about as clearly as anyone. But the work is tough. Undeniably. It's athletically poetic. Where would we be without it? What a dumb way to think, I suppose.

They have De Kooning's "Attic" and a much later one from the 70's not far away. I love the work from the 70's. His vision just blooms and undulates like he's constructing something that breathes, battered and eviscerated though it may be. I'm for art that's beaten into existence. On top of this De Kooning's is sexy and lovely and sensuous. Like you can see the genesis of a genetic lineage of flowers.






Willem De Kooning
Untitled 1975



Sure, De Kooning has all the signature marks of the macho bravado of Abstract Expressionism, but really, enough with all the schoolyard hushed talk about the aggressive kid. In-crowd reactionary art about other art really only goes so far. Endurance calls for far more personal risk. Except Paul McCarthy. Fire away, sir. Yours is keen insight into universal human absurdity.

Untitled XI from 1975 is juicy. It's a prime example of a consistency lacking in contemporary discipline. If a better pure painter was produced in the States in the 20th century I have yet to discover them.

Joan Mitchell comes close.






Joan Mitchell
Untitled 1955


I want her to tie me to a chair in a room with one wall of windows and beat on me until I pass out. Is that weird?







Cy Twombly
The First Part of the Return from Parnassus 1961




Twombly speaks my language. To quote a love song by Erland Oye: "My baby, when you're gone there's no one, and I'm lonely." It's as simple as that. Twombly's aesthetic is par excellence when it comes to speaking in tongues.

I just read the below article which was presented not long ago by Carol A. Nigro. It's got it all. I won't waste your time.


Cy Twombly's Humanist Upbringing, Carol A. Nigro, http://www.tate.org.uk/res earch/tateresearch/tatepap ers/08autumn/carol-a-nigro .shtm





Surprises abound in museums. It has become a place for me to go to gauge my devotion to what I'm supposedly aiming for in my own life. You go for lessons, for discussion, to see what still seems spectacular, what has become stale or banal or has always failed spectacularly. Have I kept myself flexible? Have I kept myself open yet sought insight and formed my own opinions? It's all there for us. I collect toss-aways and garbage and debris and going to the museum offers much of the same, too. It's just more rich raw material much of the time, raw material to be left intact for others.

I've seen Doris Salceda's work before. Many times even, but often in reproduction. At least, the concrete and furniture piece. It really grabbed me this time. I was just ready for it to come inside. It's arranged in a little niche with some other great work.

A Kiki Smith for one. Her work has had a line directly into me for as long as I am able to recall. A very straightforward display of what looks like flayed flesh is pinned to a wall. It's just paper and water based paint but it knocked me over from a hundred feet away just the same. Preschool children use these materials. Here it is on a museum wall knocking me silly.





Kiki Smith
Untitled 1988








Brice Marden
Attendant 2, 1996-99



Brice Marden is odd. His shift to the above play of abstraction was some of the first nonobjective painting toward which my developing eye gravitated.

That means a lot to me. Finding those ins to new terrain is one thing that perhaps the information age takes for granted. But, as I've maintained for years, the phenomenological experience of even 2D images is irreplaceable. Growing up as I did in one of the vast expanses of nowhere in the U.S. I seldom came across good art. So, discovering Marden in books was one thing. Rediscovering him in person was something else.

But he holds. The flow and sensuality of the image can be somewhat beleaguered by it's dry, stiff surface. This tension is nice. All the simple formal elements add up to some very poetic results. And sincerity, too. Take the leap; risk being sentimental and lame.







Mary Cassatt
The Child's Bath, 1893








Mary Cassatt has long been a mainstay of my visual vocabulary. Probably even before my age reached the double digits. It's all kind of kitschy and borders on the verge of a Hallmark Card image, but that's the risk she took. It's one of the most difficult risks a serious artist can take; to be intellectually branded as kitschy or sentimental.

But the work is powerfully touching. Cassatt worked fucking hard. And she didn't stray into territory where her personal visual endeavors didn't belong. That's too easy to do. She found her voice, and she stuck it out.

The bit of canvas in "The Bath" I detailed up top, it's some of my favorite rendering and placement of shape within composition of any painting I've ever seen. There is, of course, something baptismal or at least loosely affiliated with Christian imagery going on in this painting. What with the washing of feet and all. The pose is something similar to Michelangelo's Pieta'. I'm injecting some of my personal baggage into it, of course, but I can't help but see it as an image of protection. A protector finding rituals appropriate for shuttling their ilk into a harsh world.








Luca Giordano
Abduction of the Sabine Women
1675/80





I never knew anything about Luca Giordano. My preferences in pre-modern paintings never really veered toward the grandiose canvases of the Italians, but I was captivated in that area in the collection. Not just by Giordano's Abduction, but most potently by far.

First of all, the arrangement of the life-sized figures is unusual, it's emphatically asymmetrical. The action is lead and played out over and over (rendering the retelling of this particular tale a more horrible and less theatrical tone). In fact, Giordano's handling of paint and his treatment of the figure in both rendering and pose look so much like what Goya did a little while later.

I am absolutely blown away by this piece. It's pathos and violence are powerful. It sweeps and punctuates the space.








Philip Guston
Reverse



I'm not sure what to say about Philip Guston at this point in my life. He's meant so much to me. I don't think it's all gold. It's not. His is a modern art hero's tale, but its got legitimacy. He took unintellectual risks. His Plain in Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum collection changed me. He was just a name before that. Painters need to look at Guston's surfaces. I assumed that more knew what this meant, but it isn't so. It's very much a painter's term. If ever any Ab Ex painter managed to infuse concept into the material and breath new life into a brush's touch, Guston was he.

Brice Marden's flow of image which I'd mentioned as being somewhat incongruent to the paint handling and surface; Guston's like that, too, but it's the opposite. His images and drawing are clunky. But the surface and paint handling are delicious. His is a virtuosity and grandeur supporting images of feverish insomnia and awkwardness.

I love that he took what was developed in materials and imagery through Abstract Expressionism and brought it back to a heavy human stain again.

Automatism. The re-emergance of the figure from long abstracted fields. Homage to history's stake. A head completely in the present. These things combine brilliantly in Guston's work. It's pregnant with human sadness, and the paintings and drawings respirate between feeling congested and expansive all at once. From Phil Guston I've learned to better honor my instincts. From Phil Glass I've renewed my commitment to making work that could be feasibly authored by an idiot. There's a powerfully subversive sophistication to simple-mindedness.

I also very recently saw his Reverse which was painted late in life at the Toledo Museum of Art. It's miles deep, but so spare. He gifted it to a writer whom he met late in his life, a man through whom he felt understood and with whom he had great conversations.

I have a terrible feeling in my stomach. It comes from the suspicion that passionate writers and visual artists don't have a healthy relationship anymore. Writers invested in art write about art and read art theory. Artists read theory, too, and then make work about it. But the two are divorced from one another. No communication. It seems stagnant and incestuous. Gross and sad.


















Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (French, 1796-1875) isn't exactly pertinent to young artists. I overlooked him for a couple of decades. Landscapes from the 19th century don't exactly make me quiver and tingle. Corot is a painter's painter in certain ways, though. His landscapes were obviously consumed readily by a nonpainter audience in his time, but they are sophisticated in ways that stimulate a much more discerning pair of eyes, too. The light is exquisite, often of an aching timbre.





Jean Baptiste Camille Corot
Souvenir of the Environs of Lake Nemi, 1865




But I was so surprised and mesmerized by his Interrupted Reading from 1870. The treatment of the figure, it's blockiness and heaviness; they seem to allude to what would come to us through the Cubists. My ignorance prohibits me at this moment from knowing whether or not Picasso studied Corot's work at all, but this piece reads undeniably like a precursor to many of Picasso's monumental women. If seen in context with his tight and meticulous landscapes it comes across as that much more surprising. It's comparatively loose, paired down, and the focus is brought to very specific points. The feel of Corot's brush on the surface suddenly becomes more intimate.







Jean Baptiste Camille Corot
Interrupted Reading 1870




It's noteworthy to point out that the piece Interrupted Reading was painted in the last years of Corot's life. It radiates a lifetime of looking and studying, of the reward inherent in continually finding the profundity in playfulness. What else could it be but that very concept which Picasso was trying to tell us later?





Pablo Picasso
Head 1927



Picasso's surrealist figurative experiments from the 1920's and 30's couldn't possibly mean more to me. Just brutal and raw. Splayed, crooked, taut, unflinching. Playfulness like this is as offputting and inevitable as a young boy torturing small animals.

They say more about our conundrum of being human than most would like to admit.









Gerhard Richter
Ice 3




The seductive qualities of oil paint are seemingly limitless. Never mind all the intellectual rigor mortis. It's just sexy and full of life and death by itself. One of the challenges of art making is to present something that stands on its own as an experience of significant and shaped magnetism. Oil on surface has proven itself to get an artist there with great efficiency through all the technological changes. There will never be a viable substitute for human on human fucking. Oil paint has that same primal quality.

So, it's with some real disappointment that I find myself at odds with my most recent encounters with Gerhard Richter's work. In my development as a painter he's been key in that primal seduction with the material. I suppose I've always been aware of the fierce intellect behind his practice, but now I cannot shed it's ubiquitous coloring of the work.

Consistency is Richter's domain. He's kept that same cool rhythm for decades. And, obviously, he's been quite prolific. So now where his abstracts seemed so celebratory before, they now feel clinical. Or, more precisely, the ever-present clinical quality is not subsumed by their celebratory bravado. How did I never note the restraint in the past? His power as a painter is astounding, but the lack of animus leaves one feeling bereft of a potentially deeper experience. It's an interesting tension. The odd taste of failure seems to come from these canvases painted with such virtuosity.








Gerhard Richter
Two Candles, 1982






Martin Puryear
Sanctuary 1982


I know dick about Martin Puryear. I was lucky enough to happen to be in MOMA when his retrospective was taking place in New York. I admit, I glanced over most of it.

Sanctuary really grabbed me, though. Figurative nonliteral sculpture with a healthy pinch of playfulness grabs my boys. If I weren't as clumsy I'd work with wood instead of paint. But I can't afford to lose all my fingers right now.







Charles Ray
Hinoki, 2007




Charles Ray's room feels like a meditation room. That seems fitting. Or probably intentional. "Hinoki" looks like a dead log. That's what it is, but not really. Or actually, not, but just not entirely. It seems too pale and uninflected to be that, so you start thinking "this must be cast" because something is off about it. If you look closely or just read the information provided you learn that it's all carved. It's a carved sculpture of a dead log Ray had found, but it's carved from new wood by a team of professionals from Japan. Ray cast it, and they imitated the form.

Can one transfer the consciousness of a fallen and decaying tree into a less decayed "tree?" Or is this about the projected consciousness we put into other things? When we preserve things is it just another pathetic and beautiful attempt to talk to the future about our thoughts?

I'm not one to react well or readily to information-heavy pieces, but it's unfair to call Ray's piece info-heavy. It provides so much visual pleasure and weirdness. It's graceful and meditative and proportioned to elicit charged response to a viewer's bodily interaction in space. It's also celebratory. A dead log, but given a proxy through which it's likeness will last another several hundred years. All with the visible touches of the human hand and mind.

This was intended to be a succinct and thorough personal review of my experiences at the Chicago Institute Museum of Art. It failed. It was terribly naive of me to think that I could do it all at once. It's really just a paltry cross section at best. But, then I've always set out to offer impressions rather than enlightenment.

My collection of sensations there will never be forgotten, but also never fully expounded upon in a blog. Another lesson in humility.

Brown Line Eyes

Brown Line Eyes




For some weeks I've been depending on the trains in Chicago to get to and from work. The cold and snow are too much for my limited body and limited gear to ride my bicycle.

It's been nice to read on the train. People watching is fascinating, too. There were some new fashion spread billboards put up on the Brown Line platform. They're roughly lifesize images of a smiling model in winter wear. Situated as they are along the railing that lines the outer edge of the platform they are exposed to vandals. I waited several days to see what would happen. Soon enough someone acted on their compulsion to decry the outlandishly handsome man's image. But the marks were surprising. Just angry slashes across the eyes. None of the usual squiggled marker or highly stylized graffiti. Not even blackened teeth.

Staggering around doing the best we can.



Xmas came in like a lonesome coma. I languished in the resulting miasma most of the day. Out of bed, sure, but joined at the hip with a bottle of red wine and no bath; one doesn't really leave bed like this.

Back to Herzog for me. I opted to look into one of his earlier films, The Land of Silence and Darkness from 1971. He presents a number of German citizens who are all in various stages of being struck both blind and deaf. Some went deaf and then blind later in life, one after the other. Some were born into deafness to be followed by the loss of sight or vice versa. We follow a woman whom had taken a violent spill down some stairs as a child. The blow swiftly robbed her of sight and secluded her to her bed. Without warning her hearing began quickly to sputter and fail as well.

She communicates using a system developed over time via the palm of the hand. It's known as the tactile alphabet. Throughout the film she steadfastly displays a will of iron and unending energy. She slowly but emphatically employs the tactile alphabet in greeting old friends and new acquaintances alike.

Herzog shows us how each of these various people deals with the truncated sense of the world in which they find themselves. It ranges savagely from devout hope and will to lost animalistic ruin. A lot of that outcome, it seems, is a result of how loved ones and civilization in general reacted to the needs of the deaf-blind. If there was despair on the part of the disabled coupled with an unwillingness or inability of others to develop tactile communication and, therefore, stimulation then many of the deaf-blind in the cases presented became arrested in a solitary world perhaps fairly likened to autism. Locked away and drifting ever further beyond reach.

And as for those born under the veil of these two missing faculties it seems hopeless altogether. One woman training two young boys on the tactile alphabet admits severe limitations in her progress. A basic grasp of tactile communication doesn't necessarily mean that any abstract concepts are developed or understood. Communicating such ideas, it seems, is futile.

One of these boys lingers in Herzog's lens for prolonged periods. His movements and behavior are nearly indiscernible from what one could only liken to mental retardation. But nothing beyond the basic input of sight and sought is physiologically wrong with his brain. It's atrophy in regular development is the result of an impossible roadblock that forces his will into scattered offshoots. It is a state of being into which we have no insight.

What haunts me is the fragility of human powers of comprehension. Take away two of our main sensory inputs and I fear it is a very slippery slope to becoming a mindless animal.

One man was born blind. Up the age of 35 he retained his hearing, but that failed too. He had learned braille, but, astoundingly, that concept atrophied. He drifted out into the deep recesses of his mind and sought out the company of animals. He slept in a stable for years. His mother continued to care for him through all of this, but she fell short of seeking out proper care to ensure a line of communication should remain intact between the outside world and her son.









In some of the final shots of the film this middle aged man is introduced to the woman Herzog has focused on throughout. Communication is attempted, but fails of course. The man's polite reserved actions look like a faraway parody of social grace, a shadow of learned behavior. He rises from the benches where his mother (dressed like a widow and hidden behind large sunglasses) sits with the central woman and her guide.

As they chatter away about his state he wanders aimlessly behind in the grass. Completely on his own.









Herzog has something of a tendency to get surprisingly emotional in some of his earlier work. At least, in this film in particular.



Jackson Wyeth Davis III



I couldn't muster much interest in The Ecstasy of The Sculptor Stiener. Admittedly, I didn't know anything going into it, and it turns out to be a film about a ski flyer. Beautiful footage of jumps, but Swiss athlete Stiener isn't terribly interesting to me. I thought he was literally going to be a sculptor. I was a lot more interested in the workshop were he carved his overweight skis. Planks of wood. Multitude of chisels all hanging neatly overhead. Good stuff.

I like workshops. I always need one. Growing up wandering around my pop's workshop was invaluable. He kept everything. Now I do, too. Our ideas of usefulness are vastly different. He was set up for years in the first floor of an old renovated barn about fifty yards from our house in Pennsylvania. He was therefore my Jackson Pollack and my Andrew Wyeth. One whom I loathe and one whom I love. Don't worry, Dad. I love all of you.

Happy Xmas



There are a couple of days until xmas comes around again. I'm drinking borrowed wine.

But I'm not miserable despite the expectations of some. I've spent the day writing cards to some family and watching two films: Chaplin and The Wonder Boys. The link? Robert Downey Jr. of course.

What a phenom. I hadn't seen Chaplin in quite a few years. It's hurried along in some ways. The manner in which films were made during Chaplin's rise is a fascinating start to an ubiquitous industry. Downey honors Chaplin in performance and complexity. It seems he was not garrulous offscreen, either. Quarrelsome, devout to the point of stubborn, and absolutely a workaholic.

Enough.

It's xmas, I'm out of Pittsburgh, but if and when I need to visit and cannot afford to (and I almost never can) I elect to watch Wonder Boys. It is set in my former modest city of former glory. They were smart enough to film it there, too. It honors the place so well. The rooms, the light, the cramped misery of architecture, the suffocating feeling of clumsy inward terror... All of that adds up to charm. The film gets it and makes me miss it. Sewickly and Braddock are both mentioned. These two neighborhoods could't be more diametrically opposed.

It isn't to say that Wonder Boys is so close to my heart because of any of that, though. It's a fantastic film on its own merit. Michael Douglas, Rob Downey Jr., Rip Torn, Frances McDormand; this cast is marvelous.

Chaplin makes me wish I were a performer. Wonder Boy makes me wish I were a writer. But my ability to write is just a performance, my desire to perform not worth writing about.

Anyway, I miss you in your own way, Pittsburgh. Your cheap drinks. Your choked lungs. Your insulated sense of the world...

The dreams of daytime workers are different. They feel more urgent. I've recently been switched over to the day shift at my workplace. I'm up at five or six in the morning and I'm not home again until five or six in the evening.

Readjusting the sleep schedule has made for less, lighter sleep, and, thus, more vivid dreams. I rarely remember dreams at all. But I've had very strong CSI superhero-themed dark stories populating my hours just on the other side of awake. Last night it was a story about Superman (sans the S swathed across his manly chest) being duped into death and regenerated in the form of growth-accelerated fetuses. These were all lined up in neat square boxes full of some manure concoction. At the evil genius' whim a new Superman could be birthed. Once incepted he would unknowingly perform whatever unseemly tasks his creator desired.

I am fully infected by nerd. I now breath the fluids of fantasy in my subconscious whereas previously my rarely recalled dreams were merely banal scenes of living. But under the hot breath of an unseen and malicious force. Anxious dreams, dreams of powerlessness and non-agency. I am now someone more willing to take the reins of his agency. Even in the good possibility that agency itself is a feeble illusion. It's worth the risk.



There, there

It's a seemingly inconsolable double helix away from which I cannot flee; the intertwining of brutal fact and the poetry of need. Werner Herzog does this to me. I always lose just enough of how much he manages to fling me into panic-stricken and emotionally raw territory that when it happens again, it is terrifying.

I watched another one of his films the other night, Encounters at the End of the World. Based on his usual completely unromantic motivations he travels to a compound in Antarctica. Ernest Shackleton's original ramshackle hut is still there preserved. Herzog's eye is always trained on brutality of fact. He shows us all the banality and the everyday unremarkable manners of people. Scientists and all manner of drifters are interviewed. Like the rest of us they're all beautiful losers. But not with disrespect, not with the youtube era's ubiquitous self-mocking and inability to pony up the courage to take our absurdity seriously.
I suppose that's Herzog's woven beauty. His unemotional presentation, his bias, when it does come through, is plain and direct often delivered in his own soft, unforgiving tenor. He tells me that whether or not it's going to be ok is irrelevant. He tells me that the world is so thoroughly logical, that benevolence doesn't seem to naturally bloom from logic. Benevolence isn't real, it's a tactic of sacrifice in the game of survival. If we proceed with the flimsy notion of compassion then we won't be reflections of the natural world, we'll survive. We can stave off the inevitable nothingness, which is to say that we can eschew the anxious coma it would induce to consider it at length and without distraction. Go to work. Eat something.

Herzog manages some really strange things. There's an unassuming shot of the sea bed under the ice that made me feel with absolute certainty that God is simply not there. He makes no bones about his view of the pitiless universe, nature's overriding cruelty. I suppose we're all trying to find a way to deal with that undeniable fact. Pick one. Go to work. Eat something.

I want more than anything to feel as though meaning is present. I suppose I mean that I want whatever I'm doing to not feel completely futile. Doesn't some echo of goodness carry to outward points? Doesn't it fade and die at some points and get picked up and pushed on at others? Isn't that what I've found and done all along? At least, where I'm not mired by the pseudo-agony of the specter of death.

I'm still not there. I never was, and I don't know what you're talking about.

I'm doing some audio exploring. It's more like I'm taking the sensibility of paint and trying to make some audio that feels like how paint can feel. Like I've never known anything and how blissful such a reprieve as this can be. I never knew, so I'm not reprehensible by any authority.


And He was 80 Years Old


I'm catching up on films. It's late. I just finished Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. In a synopsis teaser I glanced over before viewing it they mentioned that the director was 80 years old at the time of filming. Such fine actors. Such a grim story. It doesn't bode well for advancing in age. Nothing really does anymore. I'm just going to stay childlike, thanks. Not childish, mind you, but childlike.

All You Need is What You Need

Sure bets, true sutures, and other horse shit. That's what I wanted to title a one-man show in Pittsburgh before I skipped town. Dreams can come true. It can be inflicted on you.

"One other thing I've noticed about you; you find unabashed cruelty very funny." Elise Goldstein

I hear all. Very selectively.

I get an erection when somebody warns me that I could get fired.

So, I'm letting myself get mean. Or go mean, anyway. It's not as if we're not inherently capable. I've waited long, and now I have an ability to switch as soon as I like from infinite patience to sociopathic selfishness. Waiting is luxury. This fortune told me a few months ago that genius is infinite patience. Fuck that. Waiting quietly just makes everyone think you somehow know what's coming. Patience, my friend; to be read: I dunno.

Not that there isn't genius in bottom dwelling humility. Aha.

I forgo brushing my teeth too often lately.

I Want to Drink Like Edith Piaf

Some part of me deeply suspects that the real me is a reckless, all-but-useless megalomaniac. Prone to fits of ego one minute, groveling and self-loathing the next. Hitting turbulent lows has gotten me everywhere. That's just part of who I am. I can't pretend to be different. Or, when I do I come off as a detached sociopath.

Wait wait wait... I always forget. Fuck. Walking that rope of arrogance versus aggression. Let us try to discuss the difference between these two. For my purposes, arrogance has always been a sign of insecurity made functional by way of self-induced ignorance. If you close your eyes nothing goes away as much as it just recedes to the dark wings for a minute. Aggression; it's recklessness before you can think. That's a lot more valuable.

A survey asked me recently how important it was that their programming and funding be put toward individual growth of artists. Also, is it a bad situation, this seeming inability for arts institutions to take risks? First question: Very Important. Second one: Yes.

But is any of that applicable? What does it mean anymore? I don't know that I'm speaking the same language. No programming or institution has ever felt like home, like it personally got me anywhere. Some of them buy me time. I think that's as good as it gets. A step above hopeless, which counts for everything.

I can't wait for Xmas this year. It's the first one in all of my life in which I will not be at the house in which I grew up, not with my parents. Do I want to be away from them? No. I like watching the holidays denuded of their flimsy meaning. Skeletons teaching me to want food.

Buoyes

There are always experiences coming to claim your social composure and irreverently bend your will. These will inspire and teach you.

It's really just whether you're willing to lose yourself momentarily to something overwhelming. I get that in museums sometimes, almost never at galleries, more often than I can describe or to which I'd like to admit in a nondescript moment of seemingly banal living.

Elise is encouraging me toward the world of kink. It makes sense. I like my pleasure caught up with pain.

I was hurled into a test of endurance and a loss of composure recently. The ride on my bicycle to work takes me about eight miles south of my apartment. I had agreed yesterday to meet a friend at a coffee shop six or seven miles further south after work. So, after a night of insomnia and then a nine hour workday I headed south into heretofore unexplored terrain on my bicycle. South of the loop in Chicago is Pilsen, and then it gives way to the meatpacking district, open spaces, bad roads, some strange malevolence like cinder in the air at times. Then, you eventually cut east and get into Hyde Park. More upscale and student-based. Then the darkness overhead I had seen blowing in culminated in what was just the beginning of nasty weather. It began to hail and rain on me.

And honestly, I don't mind. Riding in the rain isn't really that bad. At this point I wasn't far from my destination anyway. The right amount of dampness had gotten into my clothes and set into place a chill that wouldn't subside for the rest of the night.

Meeting strangers is a mixed bag, I admit, but always worth it. I talked with a young lady for a little over an hour when she left abruptly to go and have dinner. It left me feeling somewhat stymied as to what kind of impression I must have made. But I put less and less of my time and energy into such speculations.

So, I suited up and pushed eastward toward the lakefront in order to take the trail north. The temperature had plummeted and the rain continued. Again, no complaints. I was looking forward to seeing the lake at night this far south. When I reached the shore and began to head north along the trail the wind revealed it's undiluted force on my person. It descended relentlessly like new gravity, like a nightmare torpor. Every inch was earned.

The choppy water to my right was beautiful. The moonlight caught the froth of each spastic crest and sent it glowing across the deep cerulean and violet-green plane of endless eastward water. The wind crushed me. It sent a fine spit of freezing water over me from the surface of the lake. My jaw fell into a rhythm of set determination and slack concentration. I knew I wanted every second of this. The opposition, the unending and unfeeling force. Alone and flailing just above hopelessness is a good place to go.

I was in the habit of taking long walks in blizzards when I was young, and I did it a number of times in my twenties. It's a liberation borne of realizing your limits. It teaches you about yourself with what I can only describe as perfect will. This is as opposed to the polluted (albeit very fascinating) will of other people who set out deliberately to teach you. It had been far, far too long since I'd set myself up to be torn apart by perfect will.

Something sizable was trotting along the trail ahead of me on four legs. We were squeezed together into a narrow strip of grass and trees between the city looming up on the left and the massive lake spitting and heaving on the right, a wild dog of some sort with black and green gleaming voids of eyes staring at me as we approached one another. As the distance closed the scenario's threat suddenly grabbed me and I had a moment of panic. This thing was eyeing me with pitiless holes, the pounding wind screaming in my ears had weakened my body, I really was at a point of helplessness and a dozen miles from home. And this thing was ready to set upon me with a will of raw focus not softened or made diffident by human consciousness. The tension peaked as we veered slightly away from one another and passed with defensive glares of mutual panic. It was a pact formed in the humiliation of the forces at work around us.

Such is the unsullied perfection of animal attack. Your pompous will and supposed superiority distilled from elevated levels of consciousness mean nothing in the face of the will of animals.

Onward the trail took me along the water's curving shore, up small inclines and through dejected clusters of naked shivering trees. Ghoulish isn't the right word. It was just a throbbing, lugubrious landscape of complete indifference. That small whimper that comes with physical fight for breath began quietly. I couldn't help but think of McCarthy's The Road. The seeming pointlessness of continuing. Small hopes can mean everything, and I knew that I had a warm shelter up north.

But being there, only there and completely of that moment meant everything to me. There was no desire to go west into downtown where the buildings would divert the wind and I could be among other people. None.

As I made a few mile's headway the waves began to pound upward teen or fifteen feet in the air beside me where concrete inlets gave the water a flimsy wall against which to rail. The winding trail provided small moments of reprieve from the wind. As I peaked a small hill the violent air would slam into me renewed and rob me of breath for few seconds. Once when this happened it threw my head back and slightly to the right. Out over the bay a thousand gleaming white buoyes tethered to one another in a beach inlet were bodies in my wild eyes carried up and down in the heaving bay. My horror was real. It was absolutely beautiful and horrifying.

And this brought me to remember with new vividness the impetus of all my creative drive: I have little to no use for beauty devoid of conflict. One of my favorite authors on art talks at length about visual pleasure and how there is no shame or limitation in it's pursuit. But I like my pleasure caught up with pain.

The little whimper had by now bloomed into an earnest stifled yelp, just another lost noise in the cacophonous world around me. Ohio Beach is a cement tomb on the bay, but the spray frothed over it's edge, water protruded upward in pulsing monoliths like tongues of seizing titans and fell upon the concrete land. And still the wind railed in my contorted face, against my wasted frame bent ludicrously over the handlebars in aching locomotion. And on we go. Or not.

The path narrowed and arced around the lakeside wall of the science museum. Constructed entirely of an embankment of glass and metal, it afforded me a view into calm caves and still water in a large display enclosure. My slack and stupid face stared into that surreal and synthetic quiet. My throat involuntarily bellowed out useless jumbles of vowels and consonants from a shapeless mouth as the city skyline exploded around the bend full of beads of light and shadowy congruence. Before I could process that shift of presence twelve feet of dark lake water slithered almost soundlessly straight up into the air against the wall to my right and fell back into the blackness. It fell with perfect grace. As though it were teaching me.

Four miles from home I finally cut to the west through a tunnel beneath Lake Short Drive. It failed to cast out the wind. Emerging into the downtown area in my state was akin to staggering out of bar into the daylight. The context underlined my relinquishment of affected grace. Wanderers there looked oblivious.

Still, the wind found me at points. I couldn't help but think of the furies. Every opposition encountered is generated from my own doing, not quite karmic, not quite Catholic guilt. Eventually I arrived home closer to the verge of collapse than I've been in some time.

I had forgotten that Elise and Jason were entertaining a guest. So, it was not without some awkwardness that I staggered half crazed into the warm, calm room quietly aglow with conversation. I felt like I had returned from a vision quest. I offered my frozen, wet and numb hand to our visitor and then went to my room to try and struggle out of clinging clothes. Elise kicked into Jewish Mother mode. She listened patiently to my nearly incomprehensible and feeble outbursts about the preceding hour while she warmed her buckwheat pillow in the microwave. This she draped around my neck. I deposited my ruined form into my handy shut-in pants and a dry sweater. I nestled hunched and dumb under a blanket in the living room. The conversation went on with my added presence like a nearly comatose hysteric. If that's possible.

I don't know that my 20's went without enough recklessness. I certainly don't feel regret, but my remembrance is tempered with a new understanding that my growth is largely stagnant without opposition, without forces all too eager to tell me how my love can always be expanded and somehow simultaneously focused.