image © 2007-2008, Paul Pomeroy. I haven't been in much of a mood for playing piano recently but there are certainly those times when it's the only thing that will "
scratch that itch" ... I'm not really that proficient at it despite having spent countless hours playing. That's what I get, I suppose, for being self-taught and for not hanging around folks who could help me improve some. Still, on occasion I come up with something that gets in the ballpark of "recordable."
Artist Vikki Cruz, co-owner of the Surface Gallery, painting during the August, 2009 "First Friday" art event in downtown Bakersfield, CA.
To borrow a line from some poem I can't remember the name of: for me, encounters with art tend to "skip the skin and burrow straight to the bone." For example, although it was done as discretely as possible, the fact remains that I literally wept the first time I came face to face with a Degas (in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC). It wasn't that I wanted to, and certainly not that I planned to, it's just that art has always seemed able and willing to dodge my normal defenses and it has, over the years, acquired a knack for doing so when least expected.
I should probably clarify here that not all great art gets me choked up, and it's certainly possible that had I seen that Degas on another day it would have been met with a less outward show of deep appreciation. It's also not just "great art" that can captivate me. I have a fondness for live artistic performance, for example, and a strong attraction to simpler forms of beauty (which is the reason behind me posting the above photo and pairing it with the following music). It was therefore a treat to be able to walk around the Surface Gallery seeing artists in the process of being artists—performing their crafts, so to speak—all the while aware that the whole gallery space speaks of "simpler beauty."
I did have two regrets, though. One is that I had other obligations and couldn't really settle in to just be there. I would have loved seeing more, and talking more. The bigger regret that I walked away with, however, is that there were so few people there (or anywhere in the "First Friday" event area). I think that in a more perfect world there would be lots of families coming out for events like this. I'd hope, in fact, that parents would be bringing their kids there with the intent of exposing them to art in all its many guises; even allowing them to get a few of their positives and negatives mixed up in the process as that is, after all, a great way of producing the kind of sparks that can ignite in them a life of active creativity—something to replace their default cultural birthright: a lifetime of passive consumerism made palatable by neverending cheap entertainment.
As with most of the other posts I make here, the intent is for you to experience the music and photograph together. Click on the play button, scroll back up and click on the photograph (to see the large version) and then sit back and see where that leads you ...
Photo © 2009 Paul Pomeroy. All rights reserved.
Image © 2008 Paul Pomeroy. All rights reserved.
Image © 2008 Paul Pomeroy. All rights reserved.
Image © 2009, Paul Pomeroy. All rights reserved.
I would love to wish my second wife a happy birthday, today. More than that, I sorely wish I could give her a good long hug, look into those beautiful blue eyes (the only place I ever felt totally safe swimming) and tell her not only that I'm so, so sorry but that I forgive her.
Just like in one of those movies, we met at work, fell in love, got married and brought a beautiful daughter into this world. And then her past reached up and snatched her back again. That was in 1987. We were divorced a year or two later. What would ultimately kill her in August of 2005 was into crippling dreams and burning bridges back then. It made a wasteland out of the future places we had all expected to live. It would continue doing that wherever she went until the only place she had left was an old couch in a dark room, late at night with an empty bottle and a heart that finally quit trying to beat it all back.
"Old Number Seven" by Devil Makes Three reminds me of how convoluted the alcoholic's thought process is. It is terribly twisted and yet, at the same time, it always points straight as an arrow right into that "fiery deep." Only an alcoholic could fail to see that the idea of "drinking in heaven" makes absolutely no sense at all. Truth is, though, the only thing that makes the alcoholic want to drink more than misery is prolonged happiness. To the alcoholic, the phrase "alcohol-free heaven" is a perfect example of an oxymoron. But it's also only in the alcoholic's mind that the idea of heaven being where the bottle never runs dry is forced to coexist with a deep conviction that they don't deserve to be there precisely because they drink.
It sounds funny, but it's not. It's a persistent, internal torture that, left unchecked, drowns the alcoholic in self-loathing. Until you see it in their faces—and I will never forget the few times I saw it in hers—you have no idea what it's really like to be them. It is way beyond those self-critical moments we all have; an order of magnitude more intense than even those times when we have occasionally succumbed to self-hatred. They drink to keep it at bay, even when they know that over time the drinking only makes it stronger.
What I find saddest at this point in time is that she was never able to know there were people who really loved her because she truly couldn't understand how anyone could. I don't know where that came from. We touched on the subject from time to time but she was never able to explain it. In all honesty, I don't know if there's any explanation to be found. I won't ever know. The script writers have already put down their pens ...
Still, I hope no one minds if I pretend for a moment that the story is still unfolding, just long enough for me to add this smallest of epilogues:
Happy birthday, anyway, Dawn. Believe it or not, I still miss you.
Image © 2009, Paul Pomeroy. All rights reserved.