I began this essay looking up the definition of curiosity. I never got there, for being curious about the antonym of purpose i discovered someone had assigned “hate” as one of the antonyms to purpose - odd that, enough so i shall essay. I also discovered that unlike their hidebound predecessors, the internet does not include antonyms in their dictionary definition - curious that. “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.” - Philip K. Dick. Please don’t share that with the hoards who seem anxious to pick and choose my language. Nor i am sure am i alone in this predicament. Although i am certainly guilty of the internet meme about “not listening, but waiting to reply;” my guilt would be more too anxious to please. When people tell me their, often fascinating stories, i search for comparable personal experiences that might serve to enlarge their passion. This has not always been the case; when young and bored, i’d invite the witnessing Jehovah’s Witnesses inside to discuss their faith. I did this as mean-spirited sport just to poke holes in their faith. It may be my karma, and why so many today seem determined to fold, spindle, or mutilate my meaning. I mean no harm, except to the ruling apparatus that would homogenize the human spirit into a pliant consumer android buying shiny baubles that scroll across screens, in between snippets of communication that mostly parrot the advertising between which the snippets are placed. I can’t say exactly what motivated me to torment religious acolytes at such a tender age. It may have been reaction formation to the sham of civilization that i was just beginning to understand was not at all civilized, or if it was - it was a fineness that had long since passed, or i may have just been a mean little kid. Yet witnessing to anyone is a full contact sport, and if you go, or remain anywhere advocating to others you know what is good for them, you ought to be prepared for a blowback of substantial force. I remember one drunken conversation with my now deceased aunt, wherein i intruded my child rearing concepts as pertained my youngest cousin. While it seemed perfectly natural to me, for she had openly discussed her ideas about my own upbringing often enough; my modeling of her behavior did not play well.
I do not understand how one person’s purpose can trump another’s. Anymore, i am less and less curious; there was a time when understanding others meant knowing the what and why about their activities, but questions lead to more questions; and if someone is conflicted about their purposes, s/he will likely be conflicted in their answers. Anymore, i try to listen with some detachment, as much for their comfort as my own. I can’t say if this strategy impedes my compassion for others or no. I am unsure if compassion is an emotional muscle that responds to exercise or not, however i am certain that awareness is a capacity that expands or contracts. My purpose is to expand my awareness as much as my being will allow, and in so doing i might learn more about compassion. I feel compassion strongly, when a child cries mournfully, it wrenches my heart as much as a child wailing petulantly amuses it. Is that difference identifiable between the two pleas for a attention - not without asking the child. Our culture has gone far past that point of polite society when it was understood, assumption was the fool’s gazette. We now enjoy the hyper-smug certainty as faux idiot savant’s having been educated with all the advertising hooks used to distribute googahs no one needs, all that is necessary to know another’s heart is a glance, the same glance we give our telephone screens. Yes i could very easily be projecting - i am very uncomfortable when someone begins asking penetrating questions when there is no relational foundation. This is different from the inverse when there is a long personal history and your conversational counterpart has no interest in learning more than what they already know about you. I’m not the same person that started this essay, much less someone you thought you knew 50, 40, 30, etc., years ago. Awareness has it’s upside once you get pass the unnerving fear of staring into the abyss without the handrails of foreknowledge, conceit, judgement, comprehension - nothing except a willingness to accept whatever you can see.
I had thought the 1st time i had carved stone, that i had found nirvana (knowing not what nirvana meant, only that it was a “good” thing). This was in the basement of the Art Students League of NYC. I took a sculpture class simply to aid my understanding of mass, for at the time i was a fledgling inveterate painter. The instructor Jose De Creeft, was old, old school, 90 and able to talk trash about Pablo Picasso, casually pointing to a picador sculpture hanging in the rafters of his studio. It was made of found objects which he constructed in prewar Paris, and an idea which Picasso cravenly ripped off; because he could. I loved this old man and would have followed him to hell, if i wasn’t so young and stupid. What i loved most was the moral tone of his discussion, preferring hand carving to machines, because the quiet allowed him to think; encouraging students to pursue a wide range of studies. The difference between Mr. De Creeft and what passes for education today, is that his authority was born of experience, not a sheepskin. I did not look back, and spent the next 45 years carving happily. I construed this time as purposeful, but not honestly. In my tunnel vision of passion there was never a question but that at one point, creative gravity would intervene and my work would command attention and respect by virtue of nothing more than i worked hard, understood my craft and cultivated a superior aesthetic. That is not how it works, or at least not how it works for all. While in Jose’s class, i fashioned a clay bust, and in my haste to reach the pinnacle of notoriety, flung it back into the muck from which it came. A newly enrolled dilettante from the upper west side retrieved my work in whole from the muck and proceeded to work on it for the next 6 months. Any objections i can remember about this travesty of justice pales in comparison to my own arrogance, a character defect i must to this day hold on a short leash lest it expose me for the fool i am.
Fool, and not - my dumb luck was latching on to an activity defined, to a large degree, by gravity. Carving stone is in many ways a deceptive activity - one might imagine it requires brute force to cut rock, and to watch many mangle their work that might be true. Yet to cut stone well is more akin to cracking eggs, than tearing down columns of stone as Samson was said to have done. Stone tends to remain where it is placed, so it is not a really portable activity, which runs counter to much of modern civilization - with portability and mobility signifying power and strength. What i have gained from a lifetime of carving stone is not the wealth and acclaim i had initially been attracted to; what i discovered was myself. The quality necessary to master stone is the ability to submit, to listen. This was not easily accomplished for it required the subordination of my ego. In the last stages of my last piece, i realized that an anomaly in my vision prevents me from ever perceiving 3 dimensions. I either spent 45 years of my life on a fools errand for fame and fortune, or there is something more i am to know about living that does not include vindication. For some years, i have threatened to destroy my stone carvings before i die. That would be a hateful thing to do, not because that act might deprive the world of hard fought beauty, and yes, i believe my work is beautiful, but only as beautiful as my evolving ability to communicate with stone allows. No, i don’t converse with rocks unless they are old republican friends making ‘merica gr8 again, but the kind of communication one gains from accepting an entity at face value and working together to create something greater than the sum of its parts. This requires permission: 1st - from oneself to aspire toward decency - fake stone carvings slapped together for a buck will never be anything but. 2nd - permission from the material. I once watched a PBS documentary on a hooked-up artist with all the trappings; shots of him in the quarry at Carrara, vignettes about his tortured vision as shared with its arms akimbo maquette, and finally the quality of his superior supervision of the masons preparing the “huntress diana” for the artist’s final masterful strokes creating a masterpiece. Yes you hear rancor, but only because i am allergic to phony people. Anybody who pays masons to execute "a work art" while asserting that they are better qualified to select the stone to cut is a fakir.
It is the same for our political processes today, that we are indoctrinated to listen to talking heads explain how poverty is the result of character flaws, but that a billionaire mocking another human being’s palsy is worthy of the nuclear arsenal launch codes describes a lapse in logic that may prove our undoing. Humanity has no purpose today but acting superior to every other human being they meet. Show me the error in my logic, and i will happily retract my statement. I wouldn’t be writing this now if i didn’t at some level feel superior - the difference between me and mr. m.t. suit, is i know i am not superior, nor inferior; i am simply aware of my need to feel superior. Nor can i say i gained this helpful information from personal effort or insight, i was taught by rocks. In the scheme of things, given the likelihood of our extinction and my own advancing age, to be disabused of delusion is a worthy purpose. I draw pencil portraits of women; it is as close to stone carving as i can get without hammer, chisel or rocks - both have a native gravity which one ignores at one’s peril; either is unfathomable without humble supplication and acknowledgement of superior forces - and both are beautiful whether hard or soft, big or small, polished or rough. Because paper is essentially a 2 dimensional surface, i have the time necessary to reconcile my vision anomaly such that there is a closer facsimile of the of focus when complete. Whether i will ever learn as much staring into a woman’s face hour after hour, and day after day as i have learned from carving stone, i may never know. I do know i am grateful to both for teaching me more about myself than i ever could have learned alone.
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hate - the sonnet
hate has no purpose, thus its antonym.
without purpose most will become hateful
save those where sole meaning resides in hymn
which suggests that god might just be spiteful
or too confirm hate really is foolish.
i knew not my own hate ’til the rot grew
so foul, i no longer passed for rakish
just old and bitter - too much like the flu.
shakin’ the flu’s a cinch compared to hate -
flu’s got fever and chills - hate got nothing,
but use it enough it becomes your fate -
a life empty and without, i’m not bluffing.
Nor do i say my way or the highway,
for you have helped me see a way new day.
jts 07/23/2018
http://stoneartist.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved e
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