Last night I looked at the video and the still pictures I took of a dying goldfinch. I cried yesterday when she died. Tears course down my face now. I am still affected by her suffering and death. The little bird was having seizures and drawing backward, spreading its wings, and working its beak like it wanted to vocalize, but no sound came out. I think it got into something poisonous somewhere. That is how it struck me, the seizures were off and on, and in between it would be aware of my presence.

 

A brightly colored yellow goldfinch male came alone to the nearby feeder and remained there while I ministered to the other bird. I was standing one step down from the deck, with the little bird resting on a leaf-shaped container. The male was watching us, not attempting to eat from the feeder, but repeatedly CALLING to the little bird. I know that is what was happening, because the female went into a great responsive effort with beak opening and wings moving and body contorting. A supreme effort to respond to the call of this other bird, possibly her mate. Emotion constricted my throat. I was so…..beyond sad…. thinking about the old platitude, not even a sparrow falls to earth without God knowing of it. I really doubt that, yet I wanted to believe that birds have affections and memories of their loved ones, they recognize and love individuals. The calling of the male goldfinch lifted my heart.

 

The suffering had been going on for some time, you see. I first noticed this bird from my kitchen window on Friday, the day before. It sat unmoving on the bird feeder, feathers fluffed, eyes closed…both bad signs. The other birds had flown away. Then it rained, and the bird managed to reach a low limb on the Japanese maple about 10 feet away. No shelter in the leafless tree, but apparently it spent the night there. Because Saturday, yesterday morning, I saw it on the tree still fluffed up and partially wet, but not preening. Birds always preen to put oil on the feathers to make them waterproof, their insulation against rain. I observe it tries to fly to the feeder, but gets no lift and lands in the grass beneath. I did not let the dogs out, but slowly approached it in the bright green grass, and gently picked her up. I considered what to place her on to be safe but not confined, and settled on a small flat ornamental feeder, shaped like a leaf with a bird perched on the rim. I added some spanish moss for padding like a nest, placed it on the step rail with the little bird in the middle. It could not sit up, its toes were curled, and it fell on its side. In struggling it became tangled in the moss, so I moved the moss aside. I envisioned the leaf an altar to nature, to the Great God Bird, symbolized by the inscrutable resin Bird.

 

And then began what I’d call the death throes. Spasms of seizures came at regular intervals, with moments of comprehension of its surroundings in between. I went for my iPad camera and managed to take some photos. The goldfinch became agitated when I clicked the still pictures, but the video made no noise, and it paid no attention to that. Was I cold hearted doing this? Should it die in peace, somewhere out of the way where nature takes its course. A cat eat it. A dove peck it to death. But I also had this compulsion to watch and to note the agonized passing of one of earth’s most exquisite life forms, a creature of the air. No life should pass unremarked, it should be Witnessed. We must see life and appreciate each life form's contribution to the diversity of our world. This small bird became to me the symbol of the loss occurring all over the world, of species and habitat and all diversity. That’s the way extinction looks, you know. When birds come in too close proximity to human beings, the birds—or any life form--always pays the price.

 

What better time to consider death and the hope of rebirth, than now, today, with the dying of Winter and the beginning of Spring. As Easter approaches with its promise of Rebirth.

 

This Monday, the 4th of July, the US of A celebrates its 229th year of independence from the imperial stranglehold of those rascally Brits across the pond. The way things have been going in this country lately, that may have been a hasty decision. At least the Queen Mother can say "nuclear," and crumpets do sounds tasty, don't they?

 

Anyway, in the spirit of 1776, I declare my emotional/physical/spiritual/psychological independence FROM the following (in no particular order) for at least, uh, today:

 

- My senses (and/or sanity)

- The use of gratuitous platitudes

- Fashionable shirts

- Good judgement

- Cellular technology

- Proper dining etiquette

- Anxiety and stress

- Serious demeanor

- Non-alcoholic beverages

- Saying "OK, whatever you want"

- Being nice to rude sales people

- Holding in melodious bodily functions

- Bad cable TV

- Beneficial foodstuffs

- Less than 8 hours of sleep

- Gravity

- Commercial radio

- Channeling spirits

- Online communications

- Depression

- Vitamin supplements

- Public transportation

- Nightmares

- Britney Spears (re: "nightmares")

- Reading the mail

- Conformity

- Insects

- Scrounging for a meal

- Referring to myself as "da man"

- Paranoia

- Redundancy

- Redundancy

- Manual labor

- Dress shoes

- Limitations of time/space

- This website

 

Eat, drink, and be merry. And stay safe, kids.

 

See you in a few.

 

[+]

 

As a way of returning the extraordinary generosity and support you

have all shown me in this great community, whenever I upload a new

pic or series of shots this year, I'll provide a link to another flickr

photog whose work, personality, or spirit I feel you should discover.

 

Visit and introduce yourself. Make a friend. Share the love.

 

Open your eyes to Nachosan today.

Last night I looked at the video and the still pictures I took of a dying goldfinch. I cried yesterday when she died. Tears course down my face now. I am still affected by her suffering and death. The little bird was having seizures and drawing backward, spreading its wings, and working its beak like it wanted to vocalize, but no sound came out. I think it got into something poisonous somewhere. That is how it struck me, the seizures were off and on, and in between it would be aware of my presence.

 

A brightly colored yellow goldfinch male came alone to the nearby feeder and remained there while I ministered to the other bird. I was standing one step down from the deck, with the little bird resting on a leaf-shaped container. The male was watching us, not attempting to eat from the feeder, but repeatedly CALLING to the little bird. I know that is what was happening, because the female went into a great responsive effort with beak opening and wings moving and body contorting. A supreme effort to respond to the call of this other bird, possibly her mate. Emotion constricted my throat. I was so…..beyond sad…. thinking about the old platitude, not even a sparrow falls to earth without God knowing of it. I really doubt that, yet I wanted to believe that birds have affections and memories of their loved ones, they recognize and love individuals. The calling of the male goldfinch lifted my heart.

 

The suffering had been going on for some time, you see. I first noticed this bird from my kitchen window on Friday, the day before. It sat unmoving on the bird feeder, feathers fluffed, eyes closed…both bad signs. The other birds had flown away. Then it rained, and the bird managed to reach a low limb on the Japanese maple about 10 feet away. No shelter in the leafless tree, but apparently it spent the night there. Because Saturday, yesterday morning, I saw it on the tree still fluffed up and partially wet, but not preening. Birds always preen to put oil on the feathers to make them waterproof, their insulation against rain. I observe it tries to fly to the feeder, but gets no lift and lands in the grass beneath. I did not let the dogs out, but slowly approached it in the bright green grass, and gently picked her up. I considered what to place her on to be safe but not confined, and settled on a small flat ornamental feeder, shaped like a leaf with a bird perched on the rim. I added some spanish moss for padding like a nest, placed it on the step rail with the little bird in the middle. It could not sit up, its toes were curled, and it fell on its side. In struggling it became tangled in the moss, so I moved the moss aside. I envisioned the leaf an altar to nature, to the Great God Bird, symbolized by the inscrutable resin Bird.

 

And then began what I’d call the death throes. Spasms of seizures came at regular intervals, with moments of comprehension of its surroundings in between. I went for my iPad camera and managed to take some photos. The goldfinch became agitated when I clicked the still pictures, but the video made no noise, and it paid no attention to that. Was I cold hearted doing this? Should it die in peace, somewhere out of the way where nature takes its course. A cat eat it. A dove peck it to death. But I also had this compulsion to watch and to note the agonized passing of one of earth’s most exquisite life forms, a creature of the air. No life should pass unremarked, it should be Witnessed. We must see life and appreciate each life form's contribution to the diversity of our world. This small bird became to me the symbol of the loss occurring all over the world, of species and habitat and all diversity. That’s the way extinction looks, you know. When birds come in too close proximity to human beings, the birds—or any life form--always pays the price.

 

What better time to consider death and the hope of rebirth, than now, today, with the dying of Winter and the beginning of Spring. As Easter approaches with its promise of Rebirth.

 

Paul de Vivie - Velocio ! 1853-1930

 

VELOCIO, GRAND SEIGNEUR

by Clifford L. Graves, M.D.

May 1965

 

When a throng of cyclists from all corners of France converged on Saint-Etienne one day last July as they had done for more than forty years, they were paying homage to a man who accomplished great things in a small corner of the world. He was a man who devoted a lifetime to the perfection of the bicycle and the art of riding it, a man who inspired countless others through the strength of his character and the beauty of his writings, a man who even in his old age was capable of prodigious riding feats; in short, a man who might well be called the patron saint of cyclists. That man was Paul de Vivie, better know as Velocio.

 

Paul de Vivie was born in 1853 in the small village of Perne in Southern France. His early years were unremarkable except that he distinguished himself by his love for the classics. If it is the mark of the educated man that he enjoys the exercise of his mind, Paul was exceedingly well educated. He graduated from the lycée, served an apprenticeship in the silk industry, and started his own business before he was thirty. With a beautiful wife and three handsome children, he seemed headed for a life of ease and elegance.

 

The change came gradually. In 1881, when he was twenty-eight, he bought his first bicycle. It was an "ordinary" or high wheel, the safety bicycle still being in the future. The ordinary was a monster. With a precarious balance and an immoderate weight, it was a vehicle only for the strong and intrepid. That was exactly Paul's cup of tea. He began exploring the neighborhood on his newfangled contraption and he taught himself all the tricks of his wobbly perch. One day, on a bet, he rode sixty-six miles in six hours. This trip took him to the mountain resort of Chaise-Dieu. Suddenly he discovered a new world. The vigorous exercise, the fresh air, the beautiful countryside, these things took possession of him. He did not realize it but his life was beginning to take shape.

 

The decade of the 1880s was a momentous one, both for Paul and for the bicycle. For Paul, it was the start of an arduous and lifelong pursuit. For the bicycle, it was the end of a long and painful gestation.

 

This gestation had started in 1816 when the Baron von Drais in Germany discovered that he could balance two wheels in tandem as long as he kept moving. He moved by kicking the ground with his feet, and his vehicle came to be known as the draisine, or hobbyhorse.

 

In 1829 Kirkpatrick Macmillan in Scotland eliminated the necessity for kicking by fitting cranks and treadles to the wheels.

 

In 1863 or 1864 Pierre Michaux in Paris, with the help of his mechanic, Pierre Lallement, improved on the treadles by fitting pedals. This vehicle was a boneshaker, or velocipede.

 

Neither the hobbyhorse nor the boneshaker was a hit because of the bruising weight and the merciless bouncing.

 

In 1870 came the high wheel, and this did make a hit. Although the height of the wheel was a distinct and ceaseless hazard, this very height made it possible to travel farther with each revolution of the pedals. The high wheel caught the public fancy when four riders in 1872 rode the 860 miles in Great Britain from Lands End to John o'Groats in fifteen days. Clubs were formed, inns were opened, and touring started in earnest. The high wheel lasted until 1885 when it was replaced by the safety bicycle, which caused a further surge of excitement. Thus, when Paul de Vivie appeared on the scene in 1881, the bicycle was indeed on the threshold of its golden age.

 

Paul rode his ordinary only a year. Then he bought a Bayliss tricycle, followed by a tandem tricycle and various other early models. These were the days when the bicycle industry was well established in Coventry, while France was lagging. Fired by enthusiasm, Paul started shuttling back and forth. He was searching for a better bicycle, a search that was taking more and more of his time. Clearly, he could not push this search and also run his silk business. He made his decision in 1887 at the age of thirty-four.

 

In that year, he sold his silk business, moved to Saint-Etienne, opened a small shop, and started a magazine, Le Cycliste. Considering that he was invading a completely new field in which he had never had any training, it was a leap in the dark. In this leap, he discovered himself, and one of the things he discovered was that he could write. Words welled up within him as naturally as water tumbles down a cataract--and as gracefully. In his writing he always signed himself Velocio, and that became his name henceforth. It fitted him to perfection.

 

For the first two years, Velocio was content to import bicycles from Coventry. But all the time he was experimenting. For us, who have grown up with the bicycle, the design problems that assailed Velocio seem elementary. To him, they were formidable. The safety bicycle of 1885 left many questions unanswered. The shape of the frame, the kind of transmission, the length of the cranks, the position of the handlebars, the type of tires, and above all the gearing, these were matters that caused endless discussion and experimentation, not only in the shop but on the road.

 

Velocio's first model in 1889 was La Gauloise. It had the familiar diamond frame, a chain transmission, and a single gear of about fifty inches. It was the first bicycle produced in France, but it did not satisfy Velocio. The region around Saint-Etienne is mountainous. Velocio could see the need for variable gears. How to achieve these? In England, all the work was in the direction of epicyclic and planetary gears. Velocio struck out in a totally different direction. He conceived the idea of the derailleur.

 

His first attempt was two concentric chain wheels with a single chain that had to be lifted by hand from one to the other. Now he had two gears. Next, he built two concentric chain wheels on the left side of the bottom bracket. Now he had four gears. In 1901 he came on the four-speed protean gear of the English Whippet. Here, the changes were made by the expansion of a split chain wheel. Partial reverse rotation of the pedals caused cams to open the two halves of the chain wheel and secure them in any one of the four positions by pawls. Velocio took this idea and worked it into his Chemineau, the derailleur as we now know it. This was in 1906. By 1908 four French manufacturers were introducing their own models because Velocio had been too busy to take out a patent.

 

Incredible as it seems today, Velocio actually had to fight for the adoption of his derailleur gear. The cyclists of the period resented this marvelous invention as a stigma of weakness. They stoutly maintained that only a fixed gear could lead to smooth pedaling. Even Henri Desgrange, the originator of the Tour de France, attacked Velocio. To defend himself, Velocio wrote dozens of articles, answered hundreds of letters, cycled thousands of miles (average, 12,000 a year). At his suggestion the Touring Club de France organized a test in 1902. Competitors were to ride a mountainous course of 150 miles with a total climb of 12,000 feet. The champion of the day, Edouard Fischer, on a single-speed was pitched against Marthe Hesse on a Gauloise with a three-speed derailleur. The Gauloise won hands down. The newspapers were ecstatic because "the winner never set foot to the ground over the entire course." Still, Desgrange would not concede. Wrote he in his influential magazine, L'Equipe:

 

"I applaud this test, but I still feel that variable gears are only for people over forty-five. Isn't it better to triumph by the strength of your muscles than by the artifice of a derailleur? We are getting soft. Come on, fellows. Let's say that the test was a fine demonstration--for our grandparents! As for me, give me a fixed gear!"

 

Said Velocio with admirable restraint: "No comment."

 

The battle of the derailleur dragged on for a full thirty years. It was not until the 1920s that it was finally won. Velocio himself advocated wide-ratio gears for touring: from 35 to 85. His normal riding gear was 72.

 

In this battle for the derailleur gear, Velocio had a powerful weapon in his magazine, Le Cycliste. By 1900 this publication had grown from a fragile and unpretentious sheet of local circulation to an eloquent and influential journal that was widely read because of its incisive articles and vivid writing. Much of this writing was by Velocio himself, who never tired of describing his fantastic tours in the most colorful language. To read Le Cycliste is to read the history of cycle touring.

 

But Le Cycliste is more than a repository of history. With a passage of the years, Velocio became a philosopher. Having given up the quest for money and fame in the dim days of 1887, he could look at the world with complete equanimity. He read the classics in the original, and he applied their teachings to his own life. Between his articles on cycling, he counseled his readers on diet, on exercise, on hygiene, on physical fitness, on self-discipline, in fact on all the facets of what is commonly called a well-rounded life. His theme was a sound mind in a sound body. In wine-drinking France he spoke out unequivocally for sobriety; and he warned against the hazards of smoking sixty year before a presidential commission in the United States did so. These statements he made only after he had proved the benefits on himself because he was not a man to mouth platitudes. Thus, Le Cycliste became much more than a magazine for cyclists. It became a manifesto of brisk living, the credo of a dedicated man, a profession of faith.

 

Brisk and dedicated are also the words to describe Velocio as a cyclist. By nature, temperament, and physique he was what he called a "veloceman." Something of his enthusiasm can be gleaned from his ride to Chaise-Dieu in 1881, sixty-six miles in six hours on a clumsy high wheel. His serious cycling started in 1886 on a Eureka with solid rubber tires (pneumatics came in 1889). On this bicycle he rode 90 miles from Saint-Etienne to Vichy before noon. In 1889 he made his first 150-miler, a round trip from Saint-Etienne to Charlieu on a British Star weighing fifty-five pounds.

 

But these were only the probings of the beginner. Partly from his tremendous drive and partly from his compelling desire to show what the bicycle was capable of, he began to extend his tours. Sometimes alone, sometimes with a small group of friends, he would ride through the night, through the second day, through the second night, and into the third day without more that an occasional rest to eat or change clothes. Consider these feats:

 

In 1900, when he was forty-seven, he toured the high passes in Switzerland and Italy, 400 miles with a total climb of 18,000 feet, in forty-eight hours.

 

For Easter in 1903, at the age of fifty, he rode from Saint-Etienne to Menton and back in four days: 600 miles on a bicycle weighing sixty-six pounds including baggage.

 

For Christmas 1904 he cycled from Saint-Etienne to Arles and back on a night so cold that icicles formed on his moustache.

 

His "spring cure" in 1910 took him from Saint-Etienne to Nice, a distance of 350 miles, in thirty-two hours. At Nice he joined a group of friends for 250 miles of leisurely touring in three days.

 

The following summer he tackled one of the highest Alpine passes, the Lautaret, in the company of a young friend: 300 miles in thirty-one hours.

 

In 1912 also, when he was fifty-nine, he undertook an experimental ride from Saint-Etienne to Aix-en-Provence. 400 miles in forty-six hours, at the end of which he had to admit that his companion, thirty-five, tolerated the second night on the road better than he. "From now on," he wrote in Le Cycliste, "I will limit myself to stages of forty hours and leave it to the younger generation to prove that the human motor can run for three days and two nights without excessive fatigue."

 

"Every cyclist between twenty and sixty in good health," wrote Velocio with the fervor of a missionary "can ride 130 miles in a day with 600 feet of climbing, provided he eats properly and provided he has the proper bicycle." Proper food, in his opinion, meant no meat. A proper bicycle meant a comfortable bicycle with wide-ratio gears, a fairly long wheelbase, and wide-section tires. A bicycle with close-ratio gears, a short wheelbase, and narrow-section tires will roll better at first, he pointed out, but it will wear its rider down on long-distance attempts. The first consideration is comfort. His diet on tour consisted of fruit, rice, cakes, eggs, and milk.

 

Obviously, Velocio was a very special kind of cycle tourist. Not for him the Sunday ride with stops every half hour. "Cycling in this fashion is undoubtedly enjoyable," he wrote, "but it ruins your rhythm and squanders your energy. To get in your stride, you have to use a certain amount of discipline. My aim is to show that long rides of hundreds of miles with only an occasional stop are no strain on the healthy organism. To prove this point is not only a pleasure, it is a duty for me."

 

Velocio was sometimes criticized for his long-distance riding. It was said that he was hypnotized by speed and mileage and that he could not see anything of the country at that rate. He answered:

 

"These people do not realize that vigorous riding impels the senses. Perception is sharpened, impressions are heightened, blood circulates faster, and the brain functions better. I can still vividly remember the smallest details of tours of many years ago. Hypnotized? It is the traveler in a train of car who is hypnotized."

 

If anyone doubts that Velocio could see anything, let him read short passage from a story of an Alpine crossing:

 

"A shaft of gold pierced the sky and came to rest on a snowy peak, which, moments before, had been caressed by soft moonlight. For an instant, showers of sparks bounced off the pinnacle and tumbled down the mountain in a heavenly cataract. The king of the universe, the magnificent dispenser of light and warmth and life, gave notice of his imminent arrival. But only for an instant. Like a spent meteor, the spectacle dissolved in the sea of darkness that engulfed me in the depths of the gorge. The scintillating reflections, the exploding fireballs--they were gone. Once again, the snow assumed its cold and ghostly face."

 

Could this passage have come from the pen of a cyclist obsessed by the mechanics of cycling? No--Velocio loved his bicycle because it brought him priceless freedom, because it gave him exhilarating exercise, because it opened his mind to the music of the wind, because it imparted a delicious feeling of being alive.

 

"After a long day on my bicycle," he said, "I feel refreshed, cleansed, purified. I feel that I have established contact with my environment and that I am at peace. On days like that I am permeated with a profound gratitude for my bicycle." It was Velocio who coined the term "little queen" for the bicycle, a term that is still in common use in France.

 

And again: "Even if I did not enjoy riding, I would still do it for my peace of mind. What a wonderful tonic to be exposed to bright sunshine, drenching rain, choking dust, dripping fog, frigid air, punishing winds! I will never forget the day I climbed Puy Mary [a 5,000-foot eminence near his home]. There were two of us on a fine day in May. We started in the sunshine and stripped to the waist. Halfway, clouds enveloped us and the temperature tumbled. Gradually it got colder and wetter, but we did not notice it. In fact, it heightened our pleasure. We did not bother to put on our jackets or our capes, and we arrived at the little hotel at the top with rivulets of rain and sweat running down our sides. I tingled from top to bottom." Passages almost exactly like this can be found in the books of John Muir.

 

It was from experiences like these that Velocio formulated the seven commandments for the cyclist:

1. Keep your rests short and infrequent to maintain your rhythm.

2. Eat before you are hungry and drink before you are thirsty.

3. Never ride to the point of exhaustion where you can't eat or sleep.

4. Cover up before you are cold, peel off before you are hot.

5. Don't drink, smoke, or eat meat on tour.

6. Never force the pace, especially during the first hours.

7. Never ride just for the sake of riding.

 

Velocio was not a promoter. His efforts to create a national bicycle touring society like the Cycle Touring Club in England floundered, and he never had an organized bicycle club even in his hometown. What he did have was a constantly growing body of friends and admirers who gathered around the master in his shop, at the rallies, and on his tours. Those who lived nearby formed a loose-knit group known as L'Ecole Stéphanoise, or School of Saint-Etienne. A quorum was always on hand for Velocio's favorite ride to the top of the Col du Grand Bois. It was this ride that eventually grew into Velocio Day.

 

The Col du Grand Bois is a 3,800-foot passage across the Massif du Pilat. The road starts on the outskirts of Saint-Etienne and rises without letup over a distance of eight miles. Velocio used to make this ride as a constitutional before breakfast. In 1922 his friends surprised him by inviting all cyclists in the area to join in the ride in a gesture of reverence. Today, Velocio Day is a unique spectacle, the only one of its kind in the world.

 

This gradual emergence of Velocio as a dominant figure, not only among cyclists but among the people of his age, is one of the most interesting things about the man because he never made a conscious attempt to attract public notice. All he wanted was his bicycle and his friends. He never moved his shop, he never had much money, and he never rested on his laurels. Twice a year, he would have a little notice in Le Cycliste, inviting all and sundry to a rally. These rallies became famous. At first strictly local affairs, they eventually became national institutions and some of them are still observed, such as the Easter gathering in Provence. Velocio himself was not aware of his stature until he was invited to appear in Paris in the Criterium des Vieilles Gloires when he was seventy-six. Then it was obvious that he completely over-shadowed all the others. Thousands gathered around him, just to shake his hand and wish him well.

 

On February 27, 1930, Velocio started his day with a reading from one of the classics, as was his custom. It was a letter from Seneca to Lucilius. "Death follows me and life escapes me. When I go to sleep, I think that I may never awake. When I wake up, I think that I may never go to sleep. When I go out, I think that I may never come back. When I come back, I think that I may never go out again. Always, the interval between life and death is short."

 

Velocio went out. Traffic was heavy, and he decided to walk and lead his bicycle. He crossed the street ahead of the streetcar coming from his left, saw another car coming from his right, stepped back, and was hit by the first. It was a mortal blow. He died clutching his beloved bicycle.

 

Today, thirty-five years later, Velocio lives on, while others, equally dedicated and equally inventive, are forgotten. Why is this?

 

It is because Velocio used his bicycle to demonstrate the great truths. Velocio's influence grew, not because of his exploits on the bicycle, but because he showed how these exploits will shape the character of a man. Velocio was a humanist. His philosophy came from the ancients who considered discipline the cardinal virtue. Discipline is of two kinds: physical and moral. Velocio used the physical discipline of the bicycle to lead him to moral discipline. Through the bicycle he was able to commune with the sun, the rain, the wind. For him, the bicycle was the expression of a personal philosophy. For him, the bicycle was the road to freedom, physical and spiritual. He gave up much, but he found more.

 

Velocio--the cyclists of the world salute you.

Castelo de Vide, Portugal.

Cathlamet, Washington

Last night I looked at the video and the still pictures I took of a dying goldfinch. I cried yesterday when she died. Tears course down my face now. I am still affected by her suffering and death. The little bird was having seizures and drawing backward, spreading its wings, and working its beak like it wanted to vocalize, but no sound came out. I think it got into something poisonous somewhere. That is how it struck me, the seizures were off and on, and in between it would be aware of my presence.

 

A brightly colored yellow goldfinch male came alone to the nearby feeder and remained there while I ministered to the other bird. I was standing one step down from the deck, with the little bird resting on a leaf-shaped container. The male was watching us, not attempting to eat from the feeder, but repeatedly CALLING to the little bird. I know that is what was happening, because the female went into a great responsive effort with beak opening and wings moving and body contorting. A supreme effort to respond to the call of this other bird, possibly her mate. Emotion constricted my throat. I was so…..beyond sad…. thinking about the old platitude, not even a sparrow falls to earth without God knowing of it. I really doubt that, yet I wanted to believe that birds have affections and memories of their loved ones, they recognize and love individuals. The calling of the male goldfinch lifted my heart.

 

The suffering had been going on for some time, you see. I first noticed this bird from my kitchen window on Friday, the day before. It sat unmoving on the bird feeder, feathers fluffed, eyes closed…both bad signs. The other birds had flown away. Then it rained, and the bird managed to reach a low limb on the Japanese maple about 10 feet away. No shelter in the leafless tree, but apparently it spent the night there. Because Saturday, yesterday morning, I saw it on the tree still fluffed up and partially wet, but not preening. Birds always preen to put oil on the feathers to make them waterproof, their insulation against rain. I observe it tries to fly to the feeder, but gets no lift and lands in the grass beneath. I did not let the dogs out, but slowly approached it in the bright green grass, and gently picked her up. I considered what to place her on to be safe but not confined, and settled on a small flat ornamental feeder, shaped like a leaf with a bird perched on the rim. I added some spanish moss for padding like a nest, placed it on the step rail with the little bird in the middle. It could not sit up, its toes were curled, and it fell on its side. In struggling it became tangled in the moss, so I moved the moss aside. I envisioned the leaf an altar to nature, to the Great God Bird, symbolized by the inscrutable resin Bird.

 

And then began what I’d call the death throes. Spasms of seizures came at regular intervals, with moments of comprehension of its surroundings in between. I went for my iPad camera and managed to take some photos. The goldfinch became agitated when I clicked the still pictures, but the video made no noise, and it paid no attention to that. Was I cold hearted doing this? Should it die in peace, somewhere out of the way where nature takes its course. A cat eat it. A dove peck it to death. But I also had this compulsion to watch and to note the agonized passing of one of earth’s most exquisite life forms, a creature of the air. No life should pass unremarked, it should be Witnessed. We must see life and appreciate each life form's contribution to the diversity of our world. This small bird became to me the symbol of the loss occurring all over the world, of species and habitat and all diversity. That’s the way extinction looks, you know. When birds come in too close proximity to human beings, the birds—or any life form--always pays the price.

 

What better time to consider death and the hope of rebirth, than now, today, with the dying of Winter and the beginning of Spring. As Easter approaches with its promise of Rebirth.

 

This extended "holiday" has given me a boot in the ass I really wasn't expecting to get right now. I've known for a long time that there was a high chance that my son could end up showing signs of mental illness. It runs on both sides of his family. The signs have been there since he first started talking and whenever he felt really bad about anything he told us he wanted to stab himself with a sword. I don't know what parent's blood wouldn't run cold at hearing their two year old say such a thing, but for a person who went through suicidal periods- hearing him say such things felt like being killed myself.

  

For many years people have advised me not to "project" my own issues onto him. Since I've never told him I ever wanted to kill myself I don't think I was projecting myself onto him much. For years people have said "He's so young, just wait and see." Or they've said "Oh, he's just a normal kid, they all say that kind of stuff." But when I ask directly if their kids have talked like him they have always had to admit that theirs hadn't.

  

With Max's food issues people have consistently insisted that he is just playing us for power and that we're letting him step all over us. We've known differently. People are always trying to make it our own fault or suggest that Max is just being a spoiled kid because poor kids wouldn't ever get to choose what they eat and no kid will choose to starve.

  

But as I have been trying to just watch and listen, wait and see, I have seen him develop more and more into a vibrant version of Philip and I. Most parents would be thrilled because isn't that what so many people want? Little "minnie me's"? Which I think is creepy, but who cares what I think, huh? I never looked for my kid to be exactly like me and I have always been hopeful that in many ways he would not be like me because being me has been a 39 year challenge I wouldn't dream of sticking anyone else with.

  

I honestly don't understand how I managed to talk myself into believing that I could have a baby who wouldn't get my mental illness. But, I have agreed not to sit around mourning what I can't change and feeling like a piece of shit for being selfish enough to have a child.

  

So all these years I've been trying not to jump any gun or race to consign my child to a clinical labeling. But there comes a time when a mother knows better than everyone else- besides a professional psychologist. There comes a time when a mother has seen her child suffer for long enough with something he has little control over and isn't aware of. There comes a time when it hurts too much to watch; unable to help enough, unable to ease through every minute.

  

The truth is pretty hideous: I can't do this without professional help anymore. No, that's not quite the truth that I need to put out there into the light... OK. OK.

  

Parenting has driven me to drink. Most seriously. My goal this year is to lose weight, to drink a lot less beer, and to be healthier both physically and psychologically. Which I am unable to do while my child is so challenging to raise.

  

There. It is said. The horrible ugly is said at last. Having him home so much longer than usual has highlighted some things I've been worried about but which are now so blaringly obvious that if I ignore them any longer and anything bad happens to my boy because of it I won't forgive myself later.

  

The truth is that both my husband and my son need psychological help and yet I'm the only one in the family who is medicated. But never medicated enough and the longer they go without therapy or medication the harder I drink, the less I sleep, the fatter I get. I'm not saying I don't make choices here. But I'm saying that all these choices I am making are allowing me to put off complete mental exhaustion. They are giving me some kind of mental calm that otherwise would be decimated by everyone else's panic attacks in this house.

  

I can't force Philip to get help, and anyway, neither of us have medical insurance and won't be able to afford counseling or extra meds until we do. Or until we're making a lot more money than we seem capable of.

  

Max has medical insurance, however, and so it is time to get him professional help. I have been writing this post for two days now and have wrestled with the question of putting it here on my blog. I know so many people who would think putting something so personal about their kid out there for others to read is a violation of their privacy. There is some merit in that. But this is my story too. And if there is only one thing I can teach him in this life I hope to God it will be to never be ashamed of mental illness.

  

I have decided that telling it here is better. If he's angry at me for doing it when he's older then we can fight it out. Parents who keep this kind of stuff private are rarely spared anger anyway because what I've observed about parenting is that you can never do it right. Cardinal rule: you will fuck it all up.

  

How many other parents have asked themselves the same questions I have? How many other parents have had to make choices and decisions for their children that were terrifying and wished to god it was all easier to talk about? I'm not going to hide it. Someone else out there is wishing they didn't have to feel so alone and wishes they could know what other parents are doing in the same circumstances. God knows I wish I could know more parents who have a child like mine so I can know how they survive it. So I could navigate this terrifying path with a little more light.

  

This week I begin the process of finding a proper psychologist to assess Max because I believe he suffers from OCD and generalized anxiety. I am confident that I am not going to find I'm far wrong. I knew what I suffered from before I got an official diagnosis and I also was not wrong when I guessed my own mother's diagnosis which was confirmed several months ago.

  

I have made the following list to submit to Max's doctor:

   

Fiber Texture Sensitive: he won't wear denim or any slightly stiff cotton. He prefers sweat pants or soft sporty fabrics. Is very disturbed by seams in his clothing if he can feel them.

  

Other texture sensitivities: bumps in his socks he will not tolerate. He'll try on four pairs a morning to find a pair without them. If his clothes don't hang right they will drive him crazy. Mostly he's happiest when he's just in his pajamas at home. Things itch him and hurt him and bother him that seem inconsequential to everyone else. Getting him dressed has been a nightmare since he could fight me over it at 18 months old. Hates hats because they hurt his head.

   

Food Texture Sensitive: nothing mushy, EVER. Crisp textures are the best. When anything that's supposed to be crisp goes even slightly stale he won't eat it. Doesn't like wet textures, for example: if you wash slices of peeled apples because they got crumbs on them he won't eat them. Anything that is sticky is usually despised, especially if it gets on his face, hands, or clothes. Won't eat bread that is too dry and dense nor bread that is too white and squishy.

 

Taste Sensitive: This is a constantly evolving and revolving issue which drives me to drink.* He has such an advanced sense of taste that he can tell the difference between three vanilla ice cream brands. He likes things one day (or maybe for three) and then suddenly it tastes bad. Sometimes we go through periods where everything tastes bad. If you slightly over toast anything he can taste it as burnt.

  

More taste sensitivities: he once claimed for almost two weeks that everything tasted like coffee and it was almost impossible to feed him anything. I still don't know how he knows what coffee tastes like but he says his dad gave him a sip once.

 

Foods can't touch: If there is a microscopic crumb on a piece of peeled apple, he won't eat it. If he thinks his food has come in contact with any other food, he won't eat it. Especially if he suspects that it's come in contact with any of our food. He hates sitting next to other people's food, especially if he can smell it. Won't drink water if the outside of the cup is wet. Won't eat food if there is a drop of water on the plate. Won't eat two kinds of food on the same plate or at the same time. Won't sit at a table to eat meals. Ever since he was a toddler the only way we could get him to pay attention enough to his food to eat it was to let him watch movies while he ate it so that he wasn't really paying attention to it at all.

 

Foods can't be irregular: if an apple has a speck of a brown spot on it, he won't eat it. If there are holes in his bread, he won't eat it. If his egg hangs over his toast, he won't eat it. If an egg has a crispy edge he won't eat it and shivers in repulsion. If the egg has holes in it he won't eat it. If anything doesn't look like it's the right color or the texture is off or some piece of the food is ragged he won't touch it. I once got him to eat an irregular piece of cucumber by making him close his eyes and letting me feed it to him.

 

Other red flag issues: Often demands that we wash our hands before touching his food. Although he doesn't seem overly concerned about germs in general, we were sharing a piece of ice cream pie at a restaurant and he requested his own so that he wouldn't have to worry about touching our "spit area". He won't drink water that has sat around for too long. He won't let you reuse a bowl for a snack unless you wash it first.

 

Doesn't like leaving the house: He says he doesn't like going far from the house because it isn't comfortable. He hates going downtown, out to eat, to most people's houses, to school, to take a trip (unless it's to visit his friend Sam in California), or to go to friends' houses. He prefers friends to come here. If we let him he would stay in his pajamas for weeks on end and never set foot outside.

 

Doesn't play well with others: He really freaks out when people mess with his stuff. If they mess up his "set up" of Legos he treats it like a human rights violation and his friends and family don't like that so much. If they don't play exactly as he directs them to play he freaks out and has what appears to be a panic attack. Or gets angry. And yells. He can always tell when his stuff has been messed with. He arranges everything precisely. His favorite activity every morning (when he was ten months old) was to arrange a stack of videos very neatly and precisely. It was fascinating to watch.

 

He is extremely sensitive: It is the easiest thing in the world to hurt his feelings. Try joking with him. He tries to joke with other people but generally can't tell when they are trying to joke with him and takes offense. If people tease him he takes it seriously and thinks everyone hates him and feels like a horrible outcast. His hurt feelings alternate with retaliatory feelings of revenge.

 

Not overly sensitive to others: A great combination of traits, huh? He has almost no self control when it comes to voicing his opinions and feelings which are often very honest and frank and therefore quite upsetting to everyone. He doesn't understand that this is the same thing that others do that hurt his feelings. He doesn't seem to mean to hurt people and feels bad when you call him on it but continues to say whatever is on his mind at all times.

 

Expresses himself violently: With words. If he feels bad about something he's done he expresses it by saying things like "I should just die" or "I don't even deserve to have a family" or "I'm going to kill myself" or if someone has really hurt him he says things like "I hate so-and-so and will never talk to them again..." or worse yet "If so-and-so does that to me again I will kick him in the balls". Very extreme expression. Self harm has been in his vocabulary since he could talk. He used to bite himself frequently.

 

Odd quirks: He doesn't want to throw anything away. He tries to keep all the packaging to the toys he receives, all the instructions, and even the stupid little ads they always include. He won't throw old toys away either, not even if they're broken. He revealed to me one evening that he thought all his things had feelings and would be upset if he threw them away. He also doesn't like it when I clean the house because when it's clean he's uncomfortable. When the living room is tidy he says it's too "empty" and it bothers him.

 

Physical panic: Whenever he experiences physical pain or discomfort he dives quickly into panic mode in which you can hardly help him because he has already decided nothing can help and he won't let you near, but simultaneously he is screaming that he needs help and why don't you do something?! It doesn't matter if it's something really bad (it sometimes is, like the metal in his eye, and sometimes it's not, like a mild bug bite) his reaction is generally pretty severe. Yet I have seen the kid take the most intense falls from his bike and get up without a flinch even while he's bleeding profusely from the knee.

 

The Negative spiraling: One little thing going wrong in his day or his routine can make him see his entire life as a giant black hole of pain and decide that life is impossible and he sees no choice but to give up. Talking him out of his negative state is as exhausting as it is futile. It is strong and it is real to him. He can extrapolate the miserable outcome of any experience into the worst case scenario before you can take your first swig of beer.

 

Afraid of the dark: Lots of kids are afraid of the dark. Mine is very serious about it. Needs full lights on and prefers the hall lights on as well. He suffers bad nightmares often and this doesn't help. We used to turn the lights off after he went to sleep but he would wake up in the dark and be terrified so often that we haven't dared try that for at least a year or longer. He isn't a good sleeper and never has been, although it's become easier and better over time.

 

Random texture aversions: he hates anything sticky on his skin. He has an extreme aversion to getting blood on his fingers which has been quite an inconvenience since he has a terrible problem with gushing bloody noses. He would rather let the blood drip to the floor and wait until we find him tissues than to put pressure on his nose with his own finger which inevitably gets bloody. Which he then panics about. Not too keen to play on grass. Doesn't like to be barefoot outside, ever. He also will not sleep with flannel because it freaks him out.

 

Routines: All kids seem to thrive on routines but our kid holds firm to our routines as though his life depended on everything being the same at all times, every day. He hates going to new places, especially new places to eat. He hates going to new people's houses. He has daily routines that he will go to great lengths to maintain such as- eating his dessert, then pajamas, then brushing his teeth, then snuggle time. God forbid you ask him to brush his teeth before putting his pajamas on.

 

Deep Worry: He thinks very deeply about everything and unfortunately often worries about things as well and can't let go. When we moved he was really worried about our old cat Ozark who had been buried in our old yard last February. He kept thinking about him being alone there without us and feeling sad and abandoned. He thinks about the universe- galaxies and is very concerned about how they were formed and he wants to understand everything so much and it really disturbs him to get ambiguous answers. He's worried about so many things and there just aren't enough answers.

 

Over this vacation his world has shrunk and because of being snowed in and having a negative experience with a friend at the beginning of it he has not wanted to play with any friends (we've strong armed him anyway) and all he wants to do is remain in his pajamas every single day all day, he wants both his parents to never have to work again so they can stay home with him, and he wants us to play with him. He doesn't want to go outside, play with friends, see anyone but us (and his Grandma).

 

I suddenly saw what was happening- his world just became extremely small. It is very hard to be the only companion of a child. I don't want to be playing Legos and Bionicles for the next ten years. He should be playing with other kids and doing parent/kid things with us like baking cookies, reading, going on hikes, or to the park. I asked him why he never wants to go anywhere and he told me that it's because he isn't comfortable anywhere else. If I let him he will be a confirmed agoraphobic by the time he's nine years old.

 

So few parents understand what it's like to have a child like mine, unless they have a child like mine. The pain I feel for what he goes through and how easily he is misunderstood is like having my heart broken every single day. The wedge it puts between me and other parents makes me lonely and then when I get to talk to a parent who is having similar experiences it's like getting the freshest breath of air but I also feel like I want to monopolize them and suck their energy up because I don't have any of my own anymore so sometimes I keep my distance so I don't scare them off and that's lonely too.**

 

So much good is happening right now. So many positive changes have been finally coming through and I want Max to feel them too but instead he's just getting worse and worse. So while I really want to stop drinking a six pack of beer a night so that I can stop being fat and miserable which isn't how my spirit wants to feel- I am going to have to find a way to make my parenting life a hell of a lot less stressful because I can't parent my child right now on less than six beers a night.

 

Don't any of you dare judge me unless you have gone through what I go through every day. Don't anyone dare dish me up platitudes or tell me that going to alcoholics anonymous will give me the strength to live in a house with two untreated mentally ill people because I already know it aint so. I am never drunk and am not exactly ashamed of doing what I've had to do to not kill myself at the end of the day when it's been one long stream of panic attacks from three directions.

 

Every time I think I've spilled my darkest secrets I seem to find there's more. More. And more.

 

I know what my child needs and it isn't vitamin B12 (though, with his diet it's tempting to suspect a vitamin deficiency- we keep him on a steady supply of multi vitamins usually) nor does he need some metaphysical intervention. What he needs is a professional assessment so his options can be sorted through. He needs more support than he can get from his mentally ill parents. He needs therapy and possibly medication. And if I choose to wait until he's older it could be too late.

 

So along with the rest of my life I'm trying to clean up this year this will also need addressing because it is one of the greatest sources of stress in my life and it's not one that a hot bath can make disappear. If I'm going to reach my goals this year then I have to step up to the plate and stop being afraid of saying what needs to be said, of addressing the thing that scares the goddamn crap out of me. I've listened to other people long enough.

 

I've listened to them and I've listened to Max.

 

Max is this huge light of a person who's gifts are pretty incredible. He will never be like other kids or people because he was born to lead his own brigade. But he won't be able to see or use his own gifts unless his brain is allowed to rest. The greatest way that I can show my love to this amazing child of mine is to show him how to help his brain function better, to show him that having a mental illness can be a pain in the ass but most of us people with mental illnesses are people everyone else needs. We are people who see differently and have the power to show others how to see differently too; through many mediums such as art, science, words, and music. Mental illness can uncover what lies beneath the layers of this human sheen.

 

I am scared to get him an official diagnosis but I'm even more scared of what will happen to us all if I don't.

      

*I wasn't kidding. I'm still not kidding.

  

**A couple of blog friends of mine have been so generous as to share with me their own similar challenges with their kids and I have one local friend who knows what I go through because of her own experience with similar issues and I cannot stress enough how much it means to me when someone talks to me who knows what I have gone through and helps me not feel like an asshole or a failure of a parent. You know who you are- you have made me feel so much less alone and the three of you have offered much needed balm to me- THANK YOU!

London #2009

Long long ago I went through the castle of leaves

Yellowing slowly in the moss

And far away barnacles clung desperately to rocks in the sea

Your memory, better still your tender presence, was there too,

Transparent and mine

Nothing had changed, but everything had aged at the same rate as my temples and my eyes

Don't you just love that platitude? Let me go it's so rare for me this ironic satisfaction

Everything had aged except your presence

 

Long long ago I went through the surf on a lonely day

The waves were unreal even then

The hulk of the shipwreck you knew about - remember that night of storms and kisses? - was it a ship or a delicate woman's hat rolled by the wind in the spring rain? - was there too

After that it's happiness and dancing in the hawthornes!

The aperitifs had changed the names and colors

Of the rainbows framing the mirrors.

 

Long long ago you loved me.

 

- Robert Desnos (1900-1945).

 

Long ago and oh so far away

I fell in love with you before the second show

Your guitar, it sounds so sweet and clear

But you're not really here

It's just the radio

 

- Carpenters

2005-2007

80" x 96"

Colored pencil, graphite, acrylic on wood panel

 

Collection:

Crocker Art Museum

 

(Robert Cremean: Metaphor and Process, the video, may be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgrxW8xSvrA)

 

Hereafter are the transcriptions of the handwritten text on the above two panels. The first for the panel on the left and the second for the panel on the right:

 

Left Panel

 

"He has created Me as I have created Him. As He lives, I live. If He diminishes, I diminish. If He dies, I die. My laws are His laws. I define Him as He defines Me. We are inseparable, cut from the whole cloth of self-deception. He serves my purpose. By giving face to that which is not, I have created Him in My image. By My will He has created the universe. By His word I control Mine. In the beginning there was the word and the word was Mine. Fear. Out of fear I created Him, and through fear I control Mine. Through belief We exist and by consensus We prevail. Belief is the second word in the alphabet of survival. We impose order for the good of the congregation. Through fear We enforce belief. As We maintain the mirrored sphere of relativity and relationships, we demand only that the congregation believe in Our mutual self-creation. I am He and He is Me, a simple equation for mutual preservation. Enforcement is the third word in the alphabet of survival. Mine is the most primitive word in the alphabet. To have, to take, to keep, to kill. This Mineness has preserved Our Isness from the beginning of domination. The seventh word is Infinity, a belief in beyondness, the seductive lure of extension, expansion, dominion. Life beyond death. Mine. My invention of time has given dimension to My enterprise. My survival instincts have elevated reproduction into metaphor and myth, repetition into history. My Isness has defined My species from the beginning of that which is. It is I who Am. We have survived, He and I, millennium upon millennium in symbiotic union. In congregation, We have enforced Our fealty, We have forced recognition of Our essentiality. Through force and threat of force We have reified definition. Through punishment and threat of punishment We have established infinity, dominion, repetition, and dogma. We have created Ourself, complete and inseparable, immortalized by obeisance. What We destroy creates Us. Those We exile confirm Us. What We reflect repeats us. Generation after generation, Father after Father, We maintain fear and stasis. This is so and has always been so. We are the beginning and the end. Sated and bloated with our repetition, We have created one too many prophets, one too many means for mutual suicide. We implode. Out of fear We wrap the fogs of illusion tighter to oblate the light. But nothing will stay Our diminishment. Our congregations will destroy Us in Our name. What irony! Our suicide was foretold and only We, the victim, could not foresee its inevitability. We created Us and within Our creation was the prophecy of Our destruction As We believed Ourselves to be, We have become. Illusion defined Us. Illusion defeats Us. Illusion destroys Us. In the beginning was the word and the word was fear. In the Now there is the word and the word is fear. In the beginning and in the now is repetition, and through fear and repetition nature engulfs us all. All its species including Us who survive by illusion. We who insist on our separateness, Our divinity, Our dominion, Our illusion. Nature fears Us and ignores Our illusions. It shits on Our statues and rusts Our artifacts. What We believe and what We make are of no consequence. What Our prophecies portend and what Our fate will be is of no consequence. We are what Our species is and exist accordingly, hermetically and divine. Our hunger is magnificent. We devour the earth. We pollute the waters and the air with the wastes of Our sovereignty—and We pollute Our offspring with illusion. We are bloated with aggrandizement and waste. We falter in Our certitude. We have over-reached the horizon of illusion We are insupportable. Cast into confusion, We thrash about in the quicksand of conflicting dogmas. We attack Our reflection and eat Our young. Through fear, We have created Our conclusion and the conclusion of Our dominion. We have existed too long. We control now through platitude and cliché, addiction and repetition, enforcement and threat. Fear. We are gaseous with rot and self-corruption. We who have ever been the means for survival are now survival’s end. Our prophecies are now concrete...We have reached completion. The creator no longer masks the destroyer. We are one. Bloated and defeated by Our victory, We have secured Our destination, the end of history, and still We refrain. Our belief demands actualization, proof of Our oneness...and still We refrain. We are afraid. Doubt bloats Us. Fear bloats Us. We are bloated by oneness. Consumed by completion, without proof of completion, We are suspended within a bubble of silence. Waiting. Our death is assured. We are bloated with it. We reek of it. All, save Us, know that this is so. We are senseless with confusion. We wait. We cling and We wait, terrorized by silence. Our dominion is silent. It has witnessed Our creation, our Oneness, and Our suicide. It sees what We do not see. It hears what we do not hear. It knows what we do not know. It is afraid. What has always been is no more and it is silent. It is afraid. Our death began with a light so bright that the future was cast into silhouettes and stains of shadow. We took no heed. Our suicide was accidental. We lacked connection with death as We lacked connection with life. It was expediential, a means to an end. It was, however, an end that was not foreseen. Our death was in the light and We embraced it. Without connection, we embraced it. Our dominion has no alternative to Our Isness. We have ruled by fear and threat. Our illusion, Our protectorate concedes no alternative. As we die Our dominion dies. It is blinded by Our blindness. It is blinded by Our light as We are blinded by the light, and it is by the light that Our dominion, Our Isness, will end. There is no alternative. We have embraced the light. Stunned by Our accomplishment, We became I within the mirror of mutual creation, the power of Our reflection fused into oneness by the light. His right hand is My right hand, My left hand is His left hand, Our mirrored reflections no longer cleaved in the silvered glass of fear’s duplicity. 8/6/45. I die. That which I gave to him to give to me will die with me. I have over-stepped the horizon and the flatness of my earth will swallow me in the flames of prophecy. As surely as I created him and all my attendencies, I have created my conclusion. There will remain no audience. My death is of a finality without evidence. Would I leave my greatest invention, history, to supersede me? I am afraid! This will not be recorded. No, my death, my fear, my doubt. All that is and ever was will not be. I leave this globe without witness. I will turn this globe to glass. God’s final reflection will be the sun. I and my dominion will be turned to ashes and glass. All, all that I gave him to give to me will be turned to ashes and glass. All life, all living things will be turned to ashes and dust scattered across the reflection of the sun. Swirled across the face of the sun. Will the wind survive? I should have expected disquiet and disbelief when the earth sphered round, when the earth spun ‘round and my grasp loosened, but I gripped tighter and my conclusion was assured. I have maintained my duality through duplicity and expediency. It is easier to believe than to not believe. To repeat rather than to create. To ingest the poisonous seeds of dogma rather than to question the credulity of tradition. To defend myself against truth, I have turned fear inward upon itself and through rote and repetition have retained the enemy at the gate. Without a mass of true believers, I am doomed. My illusion is fragile. To make there that which is not there, to enforce belief in the unbelievable, requires threat and repetition. Habit. Addiction. Doubt and fear. Ritual. Tradition. All, all words and actions that adhere the individual to the group, that prohibit defection, that contour my essence and necessity. My believability. My true believers enforce my injunctions. I am Man! All things known and unknown are my dominion. I recognize no other viability. Reality is mine. It is my invention. My only coda is survival. Kill or be killed is my coda. From before the beginning of time this has been my coda. If my conclusion means my final act of survival, then I, and my dominion, will leave this globe without evidence, without failure, without abdication, without change. I will make no admission of weakness,, or blindness, or error. Reality is mine. There will be neither transfer nor transcendence. Survival is mine. Blinded by light, I have created the light, and the light will confirm me. I am in conclusion. I can no longer carry the illusion of my reality. I have reached my resolution. All that was metaphor, all that was real is now actual. I am committed to repetition. My finality will be, will appear to be, accidental. No matter, there will be no witness. I cannot contemplate nothingness, to grasp that I and my God and my dominion will be as though We had never been is unimaginable. And though it is I who have invented the scenario, the finale, though known, is unknown. Nothingness was non-existent in My creation. It is beyond the horizon of possibility. And yet I doubt. Fear remains the creator of the creation. I worship it still. But it will not save me. It will not save me as I am. It will simply assure my completion. I am afraid. If I pause, if I could pause, to consider my resolution, my completion...to confront who and what I am and have been and will never be, what is my reflection? As I trudge unwittingly, unremittingly into entropy, can I not catch a glimpse of what I was, what I will be no more? Now that it is done, can I not see, finally, who I am and what I am and continue to be until I am no more? Let me face the mirror before the light blinds me and scatters my ashes across the face of the sun. I am Man, the identity of my species. How I am defined is how we are defined. All, all are subordinate to my whatness. What I do is what we are. What we are is what I am, what I was and will be no more. I have shrouded the earth with gods and superstition and created metaphor to cover the nakedness of my aggression. Metaphor is my Isness, redeemer of destruction. Nature is my nemesis and through metaphor and mimicry I have stolen her elegant equations and turned them to artifice. My obsession with death has created history, and science, and war. I have invented time to measure my achievement, my progress, my domination, religion and art to salve the fear of dying. I am magnificent, the apex of all that is...and will be no more. Consider me. Let me list the virtues of all that you know of yourselves, all that you are and have ever been. Let me list our virtues: I have given you gods to explain the unexplainable. All that was required of you for this my most generous gift was obeisance and for this I invented rituals of artifice to adorn your gratitude, and rote and repetition to expedite and facilitate the indelibility of belief, the laminate of dominion. I have created and destroyed enemies to preserve and defend the mirror of our reflection, to describe and incise the contours of contradiction, to wipe clear the cataracts of indecision and to embrace without doubt or questioning the image in the mirror as absolute. I am shepherd to my flock. From the beginning I have led them. From the beginning they have followed. They know no other. It I who set the course. There is no other. The gods I have invented to create me are their gods. They have no other gods before them. That which I have placed before them is their god. It is I they worship. It is I they follow. I am shepherd to my flock. From the beginning I have led them. From the beginning they have followed. They know no other. It I who set the course. There is no other. The gods I have invented to create me are their gods. They have no other gods before them. That which I have placed before them is their god. It is I they worship. It is I they follow. I am the shepherd of my flock. I am shepherd to my flock. From this simple act of accumulation I have created congregations and congregations within congregations to form nations and nations within nations, boundaries within boundaries, and worlds within worlds. Past, present and future lie within my purview. My reality is omnificent and omnipresent. I am and have been all until all is no more. My Isness will have covered the earth and embraced the sun. I have altered this planet by sheer force of will, by sheer force of willfulness. My hunger has leveled mountains and laid waste the life of the sea. I have covered the living earth with sterilizing asphalt and suffocating cement. My structures steal the night. My greed fills vast pits with poisonous enterprise. To advance myself I have betrayed myself and through rote and repetition seek absolution. If my dominion trembles before the inevitability of my conclusion they sense, they know, I have crossed the line of repeat. Their finality is assured. As they survey our accomplishments, our continuity of artifacts and history, they cannot believe—although they sense and know—they cannot believe it was all illusion. Only by repetition was it made real. Only by repetition will it conclude. Belief precludes retreat. The prophecies are assured. If one surveys my linearity from cave altar to altarpiece the distance is without merit. My Isness is cohesive. I am now what I have always been. My metaphor is authentic. From pre-history to post history, from cave to mosque, through fear and superstition I have enforced my linearity. I have used the stasis of fear to support the illusion of movement through time. Inventions within inventions to form the complex of civilization, and through the complex of civilization, I have covered the globe. And now I am witness to my suicide and the grotesqueries of crucifixion. Through rote and repetition I must witness my self-destruction and immolation. I and my dominion are one. We are the crucified and the suicide and the witness to the immolation. We are suspended in the suicide’s hesitation and inevitable conclusion. Our ablation is assured. When the final repetition occurs, we who are present will be the final witness. We will be as one, a Cyclops of indeterminate size and definition, multi-visaged and single-visioned. We will be as one consumed within the final entropic repeat. Consider our structures. Consider our edifices, our stone prayers to Yahweh, Christ, and Allah prizing up from the neutrality of the horizon, casting shadows of conflict and confusion, creating allies and enemies in the linear progression of repeat. Through verticality, we have smothered the fertile soil under the prayers of the congregation. Ra and Zens litter the desert hilltops with their failed redundancies. Our compulsion to verticalize and impose our geometric shadows across the globe has imprinted and personalized the suffocating opacity of our expansion. We shit where we eat. The earth shrinks from our fecundity. We have created concepts and rationales to redeem our temporality. Timeless concepts to subvert and contain my invention of time. Beauty. Art. Immortality...and history to record our rationales for failure. We are a species without reflection living within an illusion of verisimilitude and approximation. It could not have been otherwise. It has never been otherwise. It will never be otherwise. As I and the congregation drift forward and back in this airless vacuum of addiction, the final repeat tempts us toward completion. And we know, I and the congregation know, that this pressure, this momentum of inestimable time will end. The inevitability of conclusion has cast our Isness into the solidity of product, an artifact of self-destruction which concretizes our mimicry and objectifies belief. In this interim between supposition and annihilation I see myself distinctly, without the blurring smudges of palimpsest. I am what I was and have always been until the final repetition, the end of choice, the end of chaos, the end of time; a counterfeit, a creature of such hermetic evolution that my own planet can no longer sustain my ignorance of host...a parasite of no symbiotic worth. With all my illusions, I am nothing. With all my illusions of gods and omnipotence and domination, I am a cancerous aberration worthy of obliteration. Nature cares nothing for my cathedrals and frescos, my fugues and fantasies, my arts and letters and museums and libraries of human achievement. All, all of my ambition and evidence is merely an inconvenience, a momentary rough patch on the revolving orb. But for one accomplishment, nature’s cycles of possibility would engulf me. I have stolen the secret of the sun and within the darkening theatre of repetition I will release its light. In one final act of mimicry my identity will be accomplished. I will unleash the sun. For one shining moment I will strip the world of shadow. We will not evolve. I will continue my progression. I will embrace the sun. I will continue until the final repetition. I will achieve my completion. There is no alternative. There is no return. There is only repeat. I am now and ever will be the entelechy of my species. I cannot, will not, be replaced. As we hang suspended within the impossible moment all things are equal. To assign significance seems absurd; appetites are momentary. Time is astigmatic. History’s ink is smeared with haste. As I progress, we regress. As the dominion is sucked outward in the diminishing circles of entropy, our metaphors of pubescence have assumed dominance. Puerilism in art and religion is actualized into commercial despair and we, I and the congregation, drift further, ever further into the oblivion of self-deception. It is over. We know it is over and yet I proceed. There is no where-else to go There is no alternative. I must be expurgated, but there is no power to expurgate. There is no will. There is no vision. Only I can bring the light, and only through my completion will the light be brought...a divine tautology. It is over. We know it is over and yet we proceed. There is talk of feminine insurrection, an intersession of feminine entelechy to alter the cadence of repetition, to stanch the diminishing cycles of entropy, to avoid completion, to deny the light. What pathos! It is too late for such clumsy theatricality. Even homosexuals have pranced onto the stage to strut and preen and plea for recognition. Even they demand the light to stop the light...My Isness will not be rendered."

 

Right Panel

 

"I have existed since the beginning of human Isness. I am contradiction, the avatar of Chaos. They who fear complexity fear me. They who embrace me move unhampered through the chambers of the mind, free of dogma and reprise. I occupy the middle ground between that which is and that which could be, a constant alternative to stasis and repetition. I await recognition. Within man’s strictures of repeat, I am the enemy. Predatory and seductive, I am perceived with fear and revulsion...the enemy at the gate. But I lie within. I am endemic, recognized by instinct and provocation. Those who fear me fear themselves. I am puer aeternus, eternal youth, contradiction, persona of chaos. I tolerate no reliance. No dogma, no laws, no lies restrict me. No congregation contains me. No tradition enfolds me. I am the unexpected, the impolite, and the impolitic. Expediency is my enemy. I have been given the face of madness but I have no face, only the reflection of a dying congregation intent on suicide and annihilation. When they gaze upon me, they see themselves or what they would become without the ultimate compromise, the sacrifice of self. They avert their eyes. They coalesce in the shallows. The sacrifice is too great. They coalesce. I shape myself in the middle ground, a finished but never finished entity, a contradiction without fear of contradiction, irresponsible even to my own creation. I do not coalesce. Others threaten me as I threaten them. They are the enemies of my childhood. They want me to see my face reflected in theirs, but I do not. I see only the abject poverty of sacrifice. I see them as they do not see me. I sacrifice nothing. I give everything but I sacrifice nothing. Nor do I compromise. I am the beginning and the end of myself. I accept no intrusion. My growth, or non-growth, is of no consequence. I am responsible to neither. Nor do I accept master or peer. I learn nothing. I know nothing. What I need to know, I have known from the beginning. My becoming is determined. I become, quite simply become, what I am and have always been. I have no reflection. I stand opposed. My very being is an opposition. I stand opposed to congregation. I am a solitary, an eternal question, a contradiction. I have no answers. I am not an answer. Answers are my enemy. None other can be like me. I am not a simile. I am metaphor, supplanter of metaphor. My whatness is all encompassing; my succession and cession inevitable. I am what I am. My existence is authentic. I countenance myself. All similes conform to my Isness. History postures its linearity on my evolvement. My face is the reflection of the seeker. His desire is my tangibility. I am the child born of a new urgency. As the old metaphor, my father, dies in the fulfillment of his own prophecies, I shimmer with the radiance of youth. I am hope, that most potent enabler of belief. The congregation is stunned by its abandonment. Its obeisance to a dead metaphor which had evolved through threat and violence into rote and dogma was unquestioned, its removal into stasis and suicide unnoted and unproclaimed. But it is done. The congregation has turned upon itself like a cheated whore. All that was offered in payment for service is lead coin. Death. Eternal death. I, who had existed before him, live on. Puer Aeternus. Eternal youth, omnipresent choice. Antithesis of metaphor. No dogma surrounds me. No rote enslaves me. No prophecy enthrones me. No congregation distorts me. I sacrifice nothing, I give everything without barter or bargain. No simile illustrates me. I am chaos. Those who recognize me proclaim me. I am choice, infinite choice. Only metaphor has the power to subdue me into Isness...and that is momentary. Momentary and experiential. It is through metaphor that humanity creates illusion and defends the congregation from chaos which is also a metaphor. Metaphor upon metaphor, illusion upon illusion, choice upon choice. The very Isness of humankind is contradiction, a comedy of confusion and malediction. Through metaphor, humanity maintains its privileged identity within the strictures and structures of survival. Through metaphor, specie humana has dominated the earth. Its ability to create something out of nothing and through the instinct of belief congeal the congregation into a shared reality is the core of its entelechy. But as the distance between competing similes shortens within the overall metaphor of dominion, mankind’s metaphors of cohesion now threaten total annihilation. I, Puer Aeternus, do not exist within the aging metaphors of man. I exist and have always existed as a separate instinct, a potential reality. I live in the senses. I have no metaphor or similes to support my existence, no congregation to praise my virtue or confirm my dominion. Nor am I belief. My purpose is not to bind but to release. I am chaos, indefinable orgasm of infinite choice, insupportable to congregation, enemy of dominion and aged metaphors. I am youth eternal. I exist because I am, always and forever the pause before definition. My Isness is non-linear and spherical, a suspension of possibilities that ignores the artificial divisions of time and the existence of time itself. I am a constant presence but exist only when embraced. These trysts are brief and fleeting with an intensity that can forever alter the desire of those who experience me. I am the beloved. Forever virginal, I inseminate those who embrace me with enduring solitude, the joy of self-creation without the stultifying metaphors of the congregation, to throw off the anchoring similes and hackneyed suppositions of linear authority and to cavort weightlessly within the timeless orb...infinite questions, infinite choice swirling round and about and outside under, mirroring and dissolving answers into questions in a bacchanal of liberation. For those who embrace me, all that was is no more. I am peripheral, a glimpse, as unexpected as a sudden snake or a falling star. I move freely and reside where I am found, rarely in the same place twice, never in the same place for all who discover me. I exist in the nautilus of Art, beautiful, seductive, chambered convolutions of sensual geometry. He who perceives me creates me. I exist only in the Now, and for that moment, that one timeless moment of orgasmic perception, we are one. I create him as he creates me. We are one. Locked protectively in the senses made solid, I await transparency. Transposed into sight and sound, I am Desire opacified, made palpable and tactile by those who enfold me in the obtect pupa of creation. I care nothing for these parents. They are failures. By their own admission through repetition and constant searching, they are failures...and in their failures I am posited. Their lives of ecstatic failure and self-deception are of no consequence, significant only in that they have made possible my future creation. My creator is my liberator, he who makes transparent my opacity. He who cleaves the obtected pupa and sets free the raptor of his own Desire. He who sees and is embraced by that which my parent vainly searched for, groped for, cast off and moved only to fail again and again and again. It is this moment that the congregation fears most, this crack in the obtect pupa which exposes the perceiver to a separate and conflicting reality. This the congregation fears most, the blinding exposition of chaos, infinite questions, infinite possibility, infinite questions, infinite possibility, infinite choice. This, the congregation fears most. Loss of power, loss of hierarchy, loss of privilege, loss of identity, the death of metaphor. The absence of Isness. To create a new metaphor in the face of a threatened Isness is the most exhilarating challenge for those who confront the void. It is chaos that energizes possibility. It is chaos that contradicts the void. It is through me Puer Aeternus, through Art, Puer Aeternus, through chaos, Puer Aeternus, humanity evolves. Through fear of the void, humanity evolves. And through the life and death and birth of metaphors, humanity evolves. And always, through the evolution of humanity the artifacts of artists posit contradiction to cultural rote and stasis. The lifespan of metaphor is as brief or enduring as human need. If a metaphor, through fear and stagnation, threatens human viability it must be destroyed. The ancient metaphor and attendant similes have reached their conclusion. If humanity is to live, they must die. And always there is the Puer. Always there is choice. Always there is chaos and alternative to the void. The artist, my parent, he who births me in the image of Desire, is my reflection in the mirror of possibility. My parent has always been, as I have always been, since the beginning of Isness. As he fulfills his birthright in a spermatic exaltation of artifacts, producing pupa after pupa, failure after failure, in a search for release, he creates me—or the possibility for my creation within the obtect pupa of Desire. As he disappears himself in self-committed futility, ecstatic self-deception, I am born to be created by the embrace of the embracer. Until then, I slumber. Awakened, I illuminate the sphere making three-dimensional a palimpsest of possibilities. I am the light, intangible as epiphany, I hover centered between the flat curve of history and that which is yet to be. Whether human life survives or does not survive is of no interest to me. Born of human life, I will not survive human life. I will become dust as humanity becomes dust. I am the epitome of human existence. I am all that I am. Nothing exceeds me. I am in and of the species. I subdivide the void. I create all that is created. What I view is what I see. What I perceive is what exists. Reality is what I believe. Humanity is because I am. I exist because of necessity. I will die because of neglect. All, all will fall into discontinuance. I am not a fragile thing. I am as sturdy and unique as the human mind and fashion my Isness accordingly. My death will be the death of Desire and all mindful furtherance. The universe will continue unabated. It will be as though I had never been, and, indeed, perhaps I never was. Though my death will appear foreordained and confessional, I will be murdered by my own hand, forced into suicide by rote, repetition, and dogma. The triumvirate of fear. Time will cease. Art will cease. History will end. Absence, like dust, will layer the orb and I, Puer Aeternus, will remain unborn. In a sense, I will have escaped the layering absence. Let me speak, then, as witness still-born in the womb of conclusion. Let me speak as the last metaphor. Unborn, incipient, purified by indulgent hope, unsullied by practicable application, I speak without similes. I speak as I have always spoken. I speak without regret. I speak without resentment. I speak in silence. I am revealed in light. I am illuminated in the light of my creator. It is through his Desire I speak. It is through his embrace I am heard. That which he seeks, I am. I am in and out of the light. What is nothingness? I, who live in absence, embedded in the obtect pupa of Desire, know nothing of nothingness. When absence envelopes the earth will I not then enter my true dominion? When humanity embraces the epiphany of inevitability and I am slain by my own hand, the light will embrace us all. My disinterest will be complete; my opacity, reified. My artifacts of incipiency grow porous; artists seem indifferent to my existence or intent. Recent artifacts cannot contain me. They serve no purpose other than to metronomically cadence the passage of time. A desperation obscures my insemination. I cannot Be where I am not put and though my creation is by my creator, his creation will be neither epiphanic nor orgasmic. Anemia pervades this suspension, an enervation of desire. Life has entered death’s mirror with a sigh of acceptance. Boundaries are blurred words dyslexic. My incipiency is viewed with pain. The inner light of epiphany is being sucked from the obtect pupa of Art and by the onslaught of the mimetic sun. Entropy is evolving at an alarming rate. There is no place for me. I live now in the infertile ego, sterilized by fear into empty acts of gratification. With the ossification of time into a limbo of inevitability, the layering obtect of my incipiency is a protection against the insurgency of hope. My parent, my maker, has no linkage with creation, he is deafened by the acclamation of artifacts, answers without questions. My creator is abandoned to embrace my silence elsewhere. There is talk now of abandonment, abandonment of the earth. Humanity, that which makes me and creates me and re-creates itself through its embrace of me will abandon me, will abandon its will to evolve. Rather than to abandon the Isness of the father with its metaphors of infinity and adulation of death, out of fear of loss of power and identity, humanity will destroy itself and its sphere of containment. Unable to release me and abandon their Isness, they will deny me and abandon their orb. The blind ignorance of the father will destroy us all. But I am in them and of them and no matter how few escape this globe, I attend their departure. My incipiency is my survival. How simple the equation! How elegant the resolve! I am and always have been and always will be the alternative. To whatever Isness there is, I am the alternative. I am the alternative to the Isness of the father, he who will bring the sun to turn glass this orb would spew forth himself to inseminate unknown worlds beyond. How ludicrous! His blind determination to retain power and remain unchanged at the expense of all things save his own reality to enforce his own reality is beyond laughter. It is inanity. To have arrived in such deficit after so long a journey is breathtaking. Though I, too, will be spewed forth in incipiency, he would spew forth disease upon the universe. In abandonment, I will expire without witness. Wrapped in finality within the obtect pupa of Art, Desire will lie silenced upon the earth. No songs will be heard, no eyes will split open my opacity in orgasmic release. Concepts of beauty and transparency will evaporate among the dry ashes of neglect. In abandonment, I will expire without witness. In pupa I will never leave the earth. I am in and of the earth. Embedded in earth, I will not be supplanted. I will be abandoned as the dominion will be abandoned, to be gutted among the ashes of the sun. But if the human species leaves this globe in seminal excursion, I will be carried forth as the constant presence of alternate choice. As long as humanity survives, in incipiency, I will survive, but will I achieve encasement? Will Art remain in ashes on the orb, abandoned pupae in man’s chrysalis stage of evolution? Are we preparing for this inevitability in this suspension of time and space? Perhaps in death, in the face of death, of suicide, of self-annihilation, mankind and I, Puer Aeternus, will meld into the seamless purity of timeless flight without the anchoring weights of history, and religion, and art. Perhaps mankind will abandon his metaphors, will be freed of his metaphors as I will be stripped of mine. God is in and out of the earth. In abandonment of his dominion, he must remain as proctor of the ashes of prophecy. His transport must be denied. Man/god must be denied furtherance and remain fossilized beneath the ashes of the sun. All thoughts and things that deny us fusion must be left among the ashes of the sun. His suicide must be complete. Humanity must acknowledge what it is killing, what it is leaving behind in order to survive. Abandonment must be evolution. Abandonment must be resolution. The sacrifice is too great. To have come to this end there must be a new beginning. So now I must surmise. I, Puer Aeternus, must surmise what it would be like to exist without the obtect pupa of Art. To live beyond incipiency. To be whole rather than halved by epiphany. To be one, I must project an existence in which the survival of the species demands my presence as complement rather than obverse. Can humanity exist without metaphor? If the creation and re-creation of metaphor is the defining essence of human identity and if I, Puer Aeternus, can no longer carry this incipiency within the obtect pupa of Art due to the triage of survival, what then of humanity? If we no longer have the identity of place and of placement and of relativity, we no longer have consequence. We become a virus in search of a host. As a species, we have no proof of identity. No intrinsic proof of who and what we are and have been and hope to become. As a species, we will have achieved what the mystics seek. Nothingness. And this is the one thing to which the human ego will not succumb. It will not give up itself. Unless, unless.... As I strive to comprehend that which cannot be comprehended, my artifacts of possibility dwindle. There is no re-enforcement. Possibility has become apathy. The dominion is preparing for extinction. Works of furtherance become objects of rebuke. As finite time quickens the waves of entropy and art hastens its transcription into instant history, the chrysalis of my reality is problematic. Though I am in and of humanity, in chrysalis, I am in and of the earth. My pupae will lie scattered among the ashes of the sun. In pupa, I will not leave this orb. In exodus, stripped of my artifacts of transparency, if I have not assumed dominance, my incipiency will be cancerous. Only through release and the birth of a new incipiency, a new possibility, a new metaphor unknown, will humanity escape obliteration, its self obliteration, its obliteration of the self. In contemplating survival, I must relegate all that I am and have ever been to a transparency of pure hope, that state of self-deception made vulgar by the blinding truth of Art, its artifacts of seduction and orgasmic revelation. Is this possible? When I contemplate the abandonment of place and proof and an existence void of metaphor, I cannot conceive of an existence without chrysalis, without paintings, and sculpture and architecture to house the essence of my purpose. To be free of these, to be trapped in nothingness, is a sacrifice beyond comprehension. As I am shorn of chrysalis, he who has destroyed the earth will face infinity without the hermeneutics of metaphor. Those few who escape this orb in insemination will conjoin my expediency. Condensed and rarified by pure hope, there will be nothing left, a spore in space incapable of infestation."

Last night I looked at the video and the still pictures I took of a dying goldfinch. I cried yesterday when she died. Tears course down my face now. I am still affected by her suffering and death. The little bird was having seizures and drawing backward, spreading its wings, and working its beak like it wanted to vocalize, but no sound came out. I think it got into something poisonous somewhere. That is how it struck me, the seizures were off and on, and in between it would be aware of my presence.

 

A brightly colored yellow goldfinch male came alone to the nearby feeder and remained there while I ministered to the other bird. I was standing one step down from the deck, with the little bird resting on a leaf-shaped container. The male was watching us, not attempting to eat from the feeder, but repeatedly CALLING to the little bird. I know that is what was happening, because the female went into a great responsive effort with beak opening and wings moving and body contorting. A supreme effort to respond to the call of this other bird, possibly her mate. Emotion constricted my throat. I was so…..beyond sad…. thinking about the old platitude, not even a sparrow falls to earth without God knowing of it. I really doubt that, yet I wanted to believe that birds have affections and memories of their loved ones, they recognize and love individuals. The calling of the male goldfinch lifted my heart.

 

The suffering had been going on for some time, you see. I first noticed this bird from my kitchen window on Friday, the day before. It sat unmoving on the bird feeder, feathers fluffed, eyes closed…both bad signs. The other birds had flown away. Then it rained, and the bird managed to reach a low limb on the Japanese maple about 10 feet away. No shelter in the leafless tree, but apparently it spent the night there. Because Saturday, yesterday morning, I saw it on the tree still fluffed up and partially wet, but not preening. Birds always preen to put oil on the feathers to make them waterproof, their insulation against rain. I observe it tries to fly to the feeder, but gets no lift and lands in the grass beneath. I did not let the dogs out, but slowly approached it in the bright green grass, and gently picked her up. I considered what to place her on to be safe but not confined, and settled on a small flat ornamental feeder, shaped like a leaf with a bird perched on the rim. I added some spanish moss for padding like a nest, placed it on the step rail with the little bird in the middle. It could not sit up, its toes were curled, and it fell on its side. In struggling it became tangled in the moss, so I moved the moss aside. I envisioned the leaf an altar to nature, to the Great God Bird, symbolized by the inscrutable resin Bird.

 

And then began what I’d call the death throes. Spasms of seizures came at regular intervals, with moments of comprehension of its surroundings in between. I went for my iPad camera and managed to take some photos. The goldfinch became agitated when I clicked the still pictures, but the video made no noise, and it paid no attention to that. Was I cold hearted doing this? Should it die in peace, somewhere out of the way where nature takes its course. A cat eat it. A dove peck it to death. But I also had this compulsion to watch and to note the agonized passing of one of earth’s most exquisite life forms, a creature of the air. No life should pass unremarked, it should be Witnessed. We must see life and appreciate each life form's contribution to the diversity of our world. This small bird became to me the symbol of the loss occurring all over the world, of species and habitat and all diversity. That’s the way extinction looks, you know. When birds come in too close proximity to human beings, the birds—or any life form--always pays the price.

 

What better time to consider death and the hope of rebirth, than now, today, with the dying of Winter and the beginning of Spring. As Easter approaches with its promise of Rebirth.

 

A close up of an unidentified participant in the Trail of Self Determination in front of the White House July 5, 1976 where Native Americans sought greater rights to their natural resources and more self-governance.

 

The Trail of Self-Determination was conceived by the American Indian Movement (AIM) as a way to challenge federal authorities and gain publicity for their demands during the nation’s Bicentennial celebration.

 

The car caravan began in Washington state with the Yakima nation and wound its way across the country in June 1976, gaining participants throughout the Northwest and Plains States—including the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux of South Dakota and the Wolf Point Sioux and Blackfoot of Montana.

 

The Trail group was accompanied by participants from El Centro de la Raza of Seattle. Robert Maestas said the Chicanos were providing support, but also are directly concerned with their own treaties -- the treaty rights in the 1948 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

 

The Native Americans who formed AIM were distrustful of many tribal chiefs whom they viewed as having sold out for power and money and acted as agents of repression on many of the reservations.

 

Clashes with federal authorities occurred throughout the 1970s, including at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and at the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in Washington, D.C.

 

While the Trail was being organized and underway, AIM leader Russel Means was shot and wounded for the third time, allegedly by a BIA police officer and it was revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had shared intelligence on a peaceful Native American protest in Bowling Green, Ky. with the Central Intelligence Agency.

 

The Trail of Self-Determination adopted the 20-point demands of the earlier Trail of Broken Treaties that occupied the BIA in Washington, D.C. in 1972.

 

The focus, however, was on economic self-determination: expanded land use rights, revision of mineral concessions and “permanent sovereignty over natural resources.”

 

The group of about 150 participants arrived in Washington, D.C. on July 3,, 1976 and set up encampments at an American University soccer field in Northwest Washington and at the Piscataway Indian Center in Waldorf and promptly held a demonstration at the U.S. Capitol.

 

Arnold Richardson, a local leader, said “Indians have nothing to celebrate. Our land has been stolen. We are under the racist rule of the BIA and we have had 200 people murdered since Wounded Knee.

 

On the July 4th Bicentennial, the group, their numbers having swelled to about 300, gathered in front of the White House to a beating drum demanding a meeting with President Gerald Ford and a joint session of Congress to establish a new system of Indian self-government.

 

There was little press coverage of the demonstrations much less their demands until Secretary of Interior Dennis Ickes ordered their arrest when they sought a tour of the old Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) building on Constitution Avenue.

 

Fifty-four of the group were arrested: 16 men, 16 women and 22 juveniles who refused to post the $10 collateral. The D.C. Corporation Counsel quickly dropped charges against all those arrested.

 

AIM spokesperson Dennis Banks said the group had been “politically attacked because they are Indians” and that the FBI had been spreading false rumors that the group intended violence.

 

Despite the arrests, the group met with BIA officials the next day and presented a plan for Native self-determination. The BIA officials offered platitudes, but deferred on specific demands saying that such proposals would have to be put forward through the existing tribal structure in order to be seriously considered.

 

At the campgrounds, participants gathered in a circle around the drums, sometimes calling out, sometimes dancing, sometimes chanting.

 

One participant said, “The drum is round like the continuity of life. It is a celebration of life.”

 

One of the favorites chants referring to Native Americans who sell out their people was:

 

I see an apple,

Red on the outside,

White on the inside,

Rotten to the core.

 

As the evenings wore on, the demonstrators would one-by-one leave the drum circle and head for the tall teepees made of pine poles and canvass—or hogans, lodges or tents—depending on where you came from

 

The group continued its daily White House demonstrations until late in the month when they broke camp and headed home—their demands largely lost in the press coverage of the larger U.S. Bicentennial celebration.

 

20-point AIM demands:

 

• Restoration of treaty making (ended by Congress in 1871).

• Establishment of a treaty commission to make new treaties (with sovereign Native Nations).

• Indian leaders to address Congress.

• Review of treaty commitments and violations.

• Unratified treaties to go before the Senate.

• All Indians to be governed by treaty relations.

•Relief for Native Nations for treaty rights violations.

• Recognition of the right of Indians to interpret treaties.

• Joint Congressional Committee to be formed on reconstruction of Indian relations.

• Restoration of 110 million acres of land taken away from Native Nations by the United States.

• Restoration of terminated rights.

• Repeal of state jurisdiction on Native Nations.

• Federal protection for offenses against Indians.

• Abolishment of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

•Creation of a new office of Federal Indian Relations.

• New office to remedy breakdown in the constitutionally prescribed relationships between the United States and Native Nations.

• Native Nations to be immune to commerce regulation, taxes, trade restrictions of states.

• Indian religious freedom and cultural integrity protected.

• Establishment of national Indian voting with local options; free national Indian organizations from governmental controls

• Reclaim and affirm health, housing, employment, economic development, and education for all Indian people.

 

For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHsmA7BHAZ

 

Photo by Ray Lustig. The image is courtesy of the D.C. Public Library Washington Star Collection © Washington Post.

  

Several years of visiting the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition have passed where I have marched out afterwards announcing that I’m going to enter next year. The Royal Academy count on people like me to fund the next year’s show; they display just enough total crap so that we think that we could stand a chance of exhibiting, therefore enough of us idiots blithely stump up £25 to enter a piece – “Well if I’m entering one I may as well enter two” – so, £50 for most entrants – why bet on one horse in the Grand National when you can bet on a ¼ of them!

 

It was right after I had sent off my £50 that I discovered that all of the ideas I had scribbled smugly in my notebook whilst wandering around the show last year no longer seemed quite as clever or witty or interesting.

 

Multiple evenings in pubs were merrily spent thinking up peculiar pieces of concept art, offensive art, non-existent art and hideous art done by someone else, bought at a boot fair and passed off as my own. All were dutifully scribbled into my notebook – the notebook of inertia - every thought and idea I write in there, stays in there and never gets beyond rumination. The weeks vanished with no artwork created, but many pleasant nights in the pub enjoyed.

 

Two weeks to go.

 

F**K.

 

Like sluggish bowels excavating after a weekend at Glastonbury, one dehydrated little pellet of an idea eventually squeezed it’s way out of my head and wouldn’t flush, so that was the one I had to go with.

 

Fortunately the piece lent itself very nicely to more sitting in the pub thinking of filthy terms and phrases – any piece of work that requires research using the urban dictionary is hardly work at all! – why, I subscribe!

 

The biggest challenge though is not to get into the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, it is to get your work into a frame.

 

This activity took longer than the actual creation of the art.

 

Ikea and Habitat must experience a sudden flurry of frame buying in March and April every year. I bought about eight frames for two pieces of work, made two and a half sweaty-backed trips up to London to stand in the store for half an hour trying to visualise my work in each frame, bought the wrong kind (bad signage Habitat), realised on the way home at Finsbury Park that I had bought the wrong ones, sweaty-headed and sweaty-backed returned to the shop to swap them - by now sweaty headed, backed and breasted.

 

Frames bought, I then decamped to my mother’s house (ex-framer) for help with ‘fitting up’ - sounds like some kind of drug-taking terminology.

I arrived with all the equipment, and sweaty armpits. We both tentatively attempted a bevelled mount – not a sexual position – that would have been easier.

 

Only those who try to hand cut a bevelled mount on a table too small can appreciate the skill and stress involved, it would make an excellent method of torture for criminals.

 

“Where’s the body?”

 

“No comment.”

 

“I’ll make you talk you bastard. DC Hutchinson, fetch me some card and a mount cutter. Right, I want you to cut a mount for this charming watercolour my wife did of some kittens in a basket. I want a 1.5cm gap all around the image, don’t cut the signature off and that bevel had better be perfect. Well?! What are you waiting for?! GET ON WITH IT!”

 

5 hours and numerous failed attempts later. . . .

 

“Please, no more mounts, I’ll tell you everything, the body is. . . . “

 

I may, in fact, submit a picture next year that is simply a perfectly cut bevelled mount, no, several mounts, stacked in decreasing sizes and quality. I shall name it ‘Ever Decreasing Perfection’

An hour or so went by with not much progress, and I started to think that this was going to drag on all afternoon – we might not even be finished by Tiffin time.

So to prevent us overrunning into the hour of the G&T I dashed to a local framers. They did a last minute mount-cutting job, wrapped it all up and I paid and gushed too gratefully. When I got home and unwrapped the mounts they looked as though the corners had been finished using a crow’s beak, a dirty and uncooperative crow’s beak at that. Some botching was done with chalk and the gentle coaxing of a pin and we deduced that the corner of a mount least noticed was the top right - that may or may not be true.

 

Next job, getting the image straight in the mount, this activity is like the bit in films where the cop is trying to diffuse the bomb while people around him bark instructions/threats his ears.

My mother hovered behind me wringing her hands (I couldn’t see them but I could sense them) saying, ‘No, the left margin is wider than the right.’ I emitted a prehistoric, guttural cry, we swapped roles and I then took over the hand wringing and over shoulder criticism. We alternated for some time.

 

Next and absolute worst bit, putting the image into the frame and closing it up - sounds simple enough?

 

Glass in, image in, hold up to look at. . . . . . .

Hairs, random dots, fluff, un-categorisable detritus was peppered all over the picture, the mount, the glass, everything. I opened it up partially – the more you open it the more gets in – it’s like some kind of dust black hole. Once again I was the cop trying to open up the bomb casing without setting it off . . . . I inserted a soft brush between glass and image and I tried to brush the dots away. I simply mixed them up like a tombola and deposited them elsewhere, you can’t even blow – spots of sputum are worse than dust.

 

I started to wonder at the nature of this detritus, tiny hairs that I have ONLY ever seen on mounts and behind glass appeared, red ones seemed to be particularly prevalent. My mother was wearing a red cashmere jumper.

 

“GET OUT!!!!! Get that thing off!!!” I screamed. “No! Not in here, get out and THEN take it off!”

 

She scurried off like a nuclear power station worker to decontaminate herself.

 

The process was repeated again and again: fit up, look at the front, swear, open it all up, brush more crap behind the glass, close it up, look, scream, open it up, poke about with the brush some more, replace image and glass, turn frame round, gurn. After a finite amount of times it is not that you finally get rid of all the dust, your tolerance has risen as your patience has dropped and you are now willing to accept the current constellation of particles in their respective positions. You are also no longer holding the frame up to the light and peering closely at it, rather now you are having a momentary glance at the front from across the room, through your fingers and with the curtains closed.

 

So my second submission for next year will be a frame with a blank white piece of paper inside and a myriad of random hairs and dust and dots and specks. I shall name it “That’ll do, I won’t get in anyway so it doesn’t matter.”

 

At every point of the process of preparing an entry for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition you repeat this mantra without really believing it. When you get the rejection letter you blurt it out disingenuously again, “It’s ok I didn’t expect to get in.”

 

Not only do the failed entrants fund the show beforehand but they then all fork out a tenner to go and torture themselves. I imagine the majority of visitors are rejected Academicians scanning the rooms resentfully for pieces of mediocre work they consider inferior to their own. These types (and I was one on Friday night) must take with them a suitably deferential friend who will regularly blurt forth reassuring platitudes.

 

This must be one of the only exhibitions where people visiting act like sales reps who have just come back from the Far East with a case full of bargains. “Guess how much this one is, you’ll never guess, I’ll tell you, I bet that one is £35,000, was I close? I could get that done by a bloke I know in Beijing for £30. How much is that one? Look at the red dots on that one, let’s count, blimey he’s made five grand off that little etching of a hernia.” The act of looking up the piece in the book, checking the price, Googling the artist (if it’s in the print room and under £200 - to see if it’s worth buying) completely overshadows the enjoyment of an exhibition. I felt compelled to look up every piece and spent more time with my head in the book than actually looking at the work.

 

So, what was my favourite piece of work? – Page 103 of the List of Works, a beautifully laid out page.

 

It's time to tell the truth about Mr. Brown Pelican. Let me make clear what is foremost on my mind and what the focus will be: Mr. Pelican trumpets self-pitying pauperism laced with nugatory solipsism. Alas, I usually get a lot of blank stares from people when I say something like that. What I mean is that Mr. Pelican might advocate pesky obloquies by the end of the decade. What are we to do then? Place blinders over our eyes and hope we don't see the horrible outcome? We have a choice. Either we let ourselves be led like lambs to the slaughter by Mr. Pelican and his trucklers or we cross-examine Mr. Pelican's lousy precepts. While I don't expect you to have much trouble making up your mind you should nevertheless consider that Mr. Pelican's platitudes do not represent progress. They represent insanity masquerading as progress.

 

Let's play a little game. Deduct one point from your I.Q. if you fell for Mr. Pelican's ridiculous claim that genocide, slavery, racism, and the systematic oppression, degradation, and exploitation of most of the world's people are all totally justified. Deduct another point if you failed to notice that Mr. Pelican has made it known that he fully intends to create problems that our grandchildren will have to live with. If those words don't scare you, nothing will. If they are not a clear warning, I don't know what could be.

Last night I looked at the video and the still pictures I took of a dying goldfinch. I cried yesterday when she died. Tears course down my face now. I am still affected by her suffering and death. The little bird was having seizures and drawing backward, spreading its wings, and working its beak like it wanted to vocalize, but no sound came out. I think it got into something poisonous somewhere. That is how it struck me, the seizures were off and on, and in between it would be aware of my presence.

 

A brightly colored yellow goldfinch male came alone to the nearby feeder and remained there while I ministered to the other bird. I was standing one step down from the deck, with the little bird resting on a leaf-shaped container. The male was watching us, not attempting to eat from the feeder, but repeatedly CALLING to the little bird. I know that is what was happening, because the female went into a great responsive effort with beak opening and wings moving and body contorting. A supreme effort to respond to the call of this other bird, possibly her mate. Emotion constricted my throat. I was so…..beyond sad…. thinking about the old platitude, not even a sparrow falls to earth without God knowing of it. I really doubt that, yet I wanted to believe that birds have affections and memories of their loved ones, they recognize and love individuals. The calling of the male goldfinch lifted my heart.

 

The suffering had been going on for some time, you see. I first noticed this bird from my kitchen window on Friday, the day before. It sat unmoving on the bird feeder, feathers fluffed, eyes closed…both bad signs. The other birds had flown away. Then it rained, and the bird managed to reach a low limb on the Japanese maple about 10 feet away. No shelter in the leafless tree, but apparently it spent the night there. Because Saturday, yesterday morning, I saw it on the tree still fluffed up and partially wet, but not preening. Birds always preen to put oil on the feathers to make them waterproof, their insulation against rain. I observe it tries to fly to the feeder, but gets no lift and lands in the grass beneath. I did not let the dogs out, but slowly approached it in the bright green grass, and gently picked her up. I considered what to place her on to be safe but not confined, and settled on a small flat ornamental feeder, shaped like a leaf with a bird perched on the rim. I added some spanish moss for padding like a nest, placed it on the step rail with the little bird in the middle. It could not sit up, its toes were curled, and it fell on its side. In struggling it became tangled in the moss, so I moved the moss aside. I envisioned the leaf an altar to nature, to the Great God Bird, symbolized by the inscrutable resin Bird.

 

And then began what I’d call the death throes. Spasms of seizures came at regular intervals, with moments of comprehension of its surroundings in between. I went for my iPad camera and managed to take some photos. The goldfinch became agitated when I clicked the still pictures, but the video made no noise, and it paid no attention to that. Was I cold hearted doing this? Should it die in peace, somewhere out of the way where nature takes its course. A cat eat it. A dove peck it to death. But I also had this compulsion to watch and to note the agonized passing of one of earth’s most exquisite life forms, a creature of the air. No life should pass unremarked, it should be Witnessed. We must see life and appreciate each life form's contribution to the diversity of our world. This small bird became to me the symbol of the loss occurring all over the world, of species and habitat and all diversity. That’s the way extinction looks, you know. When birds come in too close proximity to human beings, the birds—or any life form--always pays the price.

 

What better time to consider death and the hope of rebirth, than now, today, with the dying of Winter and the beginning of Spring. As Easter approaches with its promise of Rebirth.

 

Pitchers and Platitudes

 

Pitcher plants are flushed with red:

Their labial flaps all sanguine

With oxygenated blood,

Their roots: lungs, breathing cold earth,

And lips slippery as slugs,

Sugar-slimed, primed to swallow,

Each long, gaping gullet yawning

With foetid breath. Just so, Death

Is slicked up by our own sick

Confections: that old lick-salve

Of abstract nouns: Honour, Faith

And Glory, those lurking wraiths,

Sweet catalysts of decay –

The enzymes which numb our pain

As we souls are spluttering,

Drowning, each guttering flame

Sweltering in the grim stoup

Of Remembrance, and watching

The world fade through the stained glass

Of our slaughterhouse-prison:

Little translucent prisms

At which we claw, scrape and flail.

 

Thus, plants’ monumental patience

Prefigures man’s murder-patents:

The hijacked plane, the atom bomb,

The burning boat, the chambered tomb.

 

Poem by Giles Watson, 2010. I have long been planning a poem inspired by the parallel evolution of carnivorous plants, but chose to turn it into a meditation on Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ in response to Carol Ann Duffy’s own appropriation of his ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ (‘Passing Bells’, New Statesman, 11 October 2010, p. 55.) Pitcher plants of the genera Sarracenia and Darlingtonia offer insects a “gift” of nectar at the “lip”, which entices each victim down a slippery tube, from which there is no escape. In Darlingtonia, “The green tube is veined with red; the hood and top of the tube are thickly clothed with whitish, translucent windows through which trapped insects might vainly try to escape until, exhausted, they fall into the depths.” (Alexander F. Skutch, Harmony and Conflict in the Living World, Oklahoma, 2000, p. 101.)

 

The old saying is "Any port in a storm" but Rolph was beginning to seriously question the wisdom of that platitude. This dark tower looked all the more spooky the closer he rowed to it...

 

This tower was worked up for an LCC brawl that I'm currently involved in. The subject is "Tower".

Last night I looked at the video and the still pictures I took of a dying goldfinch. I cried yesterday when she died. Tears course down my face now. I am still affected by her suffering and death. The little bird was having seizures and drawing backward, spreading its wings, and working its beak like it wanted to vocalize, but no sound came out. I think it got into something poisonous somewhere. That is how it struck me, the seizures were off and on, and in between it would be aware of my presence.

 

A brightly colored yellow goldfinch male came alone to the nearby feeder and remained there while I ministered to the other bird. I was standing one step down from the deck, with the little bird resting on a leaf-shaped container. The male was watching us, not attempting to eat from the feeder, but repeatedly CALLING to the little bird. I know that is what was happening, because the female went into a great responsive effort with beak opening and wings moving and body contorting. A supreme effort to respond to the call of this other bird, possibly her mate. Emotion constricted my throat. I was so…..beyond sad…. thinking about the old platitude, not even a sparrow falls to earth without God knowing of it. I really doubt that, yet I wanted to believe that birds have affections and memories of their loved ones, they recognize and love individuals. The calling of the male goldfinch lifted my heart.

 

The suffering had been going on for some time, you see. I first noticed this bird from my kitchen window on Friday, the day before. It sat unmoving on the bird feeder, feathers fluffed, eyes closed…both bad signs. The other birds had flown away. Then it rained, and the bird managed to reach a low limb on the Japanese maple about 10 feet away. No shelter in the leafless tree, but apparently it spent the night there. Because Saturday, yesterday morning, I saw it on the tree still fluffed up and partially wet, but not preening. Birds always preen to put oil on the feathers to make them waterproof, their insulation against rain. I observe it tries to fly to the feeder, but gets no lift and lands in the grass beneath. I did not let the dogs out, but slowly approached it in the bright green grass, and gently picked her up. I considered what to place her on to be safe but not confined, and settled on a small flat ornamental feeder, shaped like a leaf with a bird perched on the rim. I added some spanish moss for padding like a nest, placed it on the step rail with the little bird in the middle. It could not sit up, its toes were curled, and it fell on its side. In struggling it became tangled in the moss, so I moved the moss aside. I envisioned the leaf an altar to nature, to the Great God Bird, symbolized by the inscrutable resin Bird.

 

And then began what I’d call the death throes. Spasms of seizures came at regular intervals, with moments of comprehension of its surroundings in between. I went for my iPad camera and managed to take some photos. The goldfinch became agitated when I clicked the still pictures, but the video made no noise, and it paid no attention to that. Was I cold hearted doing this? Should it die in peace, somewhere out of the way where nature takes its course. A cat eat it. A dove peck it to death. But I also had this compulsion to watch and to note the agonized passing of one of earth’s most exquisite life forms, a creature of the air. No life should pass unremarked, it should be Witnessed. We must see life and appreciate each life form's contribution to the diversity of our world. This small bird became to me the symbol of the loss occurring all over the world, of species and habitat and all diversity. That’s the way extinction looks, you know. When birds come in too close proximity to human beings, the birds—or any life form--always pays the price.

 

What better time to consider death and the hope of rebirth, than now, today, with the dying of Winter and the beginning of Spring. As Easter approaches with its promise of Rebirth.

 

Last night I looked at the video and the still pictures I took of a dying goldfinch. I cried yesterday when she died. Tears course down my face now. I am still affected by her suffering and death. The little bird was having seizures and drawing backward, spreading its wings, and working its beak like it wanted to vocalize, but no sound came out. I think it got into something poisonous somewhere. That is how it struck me, the seizures were off and on, and in between it would be aware of my presence.

 

A brightly colored yellow goldfinch male came alone to the nearby feeder and remained there while I ministered to the other bird. I was standing one step down from the deck, with the little bird resting on a leaf-shaped container. The male was watching us, not attempting to eat from the feeder, but repeatedly CALLING to the little bird. I know that is what was happening, because the female went into a great responsive effort with beak opening and wings moving and body contorting. A supreme effort to respond to the call of this other bird, possibly her mate. Emotion constricted my throat. I was so…..beyond sad…. thinking about the old platitude, not even a sparrow falls to earth without God knowing of it. I really doubt that, yet I wanted to believe that birds have affections and memories of their loved ones, they recognize and love individuals. The calling of the male goldfinch lifted my heart.

 

The suffering had been going on for some time, you see. I first noticed this bird from my kitchen window on Friday, the day before. It sat unmoving on the bird feeder, feathers fluffed, eyes closed…both bad signs. The other birds had flown away. Then it rained, and the bird managed to reach a low limb on the Japanese maple about 10 feet away. No shelter in the leafless tree, but apparently it spent the night there. Because Saturday, yesterday morning, I saw it on the tree still fluffed up and partially wet, but not preening. Birds always preen to put oil on the feathers to make them waterproof, their insulation against rain. I observe it tries to fly to the feeder, but gets no lift and lands in the grass beneath. I did not let the dogs out, but slowly approached it in the bright green grass, and gently picked her up. I considered what to place her on to be safe but not confined, and settled on a small flat ornamental feeder, shaped like a leaf with a bird perched on the rim. I added some spanish moss for padding like a nest, placed it on the step rail with the little bird in the middle. It could not sit up, its toes were curled, and it fell on its side. In struggling it became tangled in the moss, so I moved the moss aside. I envisioned the leaf an altar to nature, to the Great God Bird, symbolized by the inscrutable resin Bird.

 

And then began what I’d call the death throes. Spasms of seizures came at regular intervals, with moments of comprehension of its surroundings in between. I went for my iPad camera and managed to take some photos. The goldfinch became agitated when I clicked the still pictures, but the video made no noise, and it paid no attention to that. Was I cold hearted doing this? Should it die in peace, somewhere out of the way where nature takes its course. A cat eat it. A dove peck it to death. But I also had this compulsion to watch and to note the agonized passing of one of earth’s most exquisite life forms, a creature of the air. No life should pass unremarked, it should be Witnessed. We must see life and appreciate each life form's contribution to the diversity of our world. This small bird became to me the symbol of the loss occurring all over the world, of species and habitat and all diversity. That’s the way extinction looks, you know. When birds come in too close proximity to human beings, the birds—or any life form--always pays the price.

 

What better time to consider death and the hope of rebirth, than now, today, with the dying of Winter and the beginning of Spring. As Easter approaches with its promise of Rebirth.

 

It's not all about business anymore...

   

Well, actually I just wanted to show off the new shoes, new suit and new baby. But it sounds more meaningful if you connect it with some platitudes.

Supposed to be looked at in full size.

on the other hand you may come back again.

Last night I looked at the video and the still pictures I took of a dying goldfinch. I cried yesterday when she died. Tears course down my face now. I am still affected by her suffering and death. The little bird was having seizures and drawing backward, spreading its wings, and working its beak like it wanted to vocalize, but no sound came out. I think it got into something poisonous somewhere. That is how it struck me, the seizures were off and on, and in between it would be aware of my presence.

 

A brightly colored yellow goldfinch male came alone to the nearby feeder and remained there while I ministered to the other bird. I was standing one step down from the deck, with the little bird resting on a leaf-shaped container. The male was watching us, not attempting to eat from the feeder, but repeatedly CALLING to the little bird. I know that is what was happening, because the female went into a great responsive effort with beak opening and wings moving and body contorting. A supreme effort to respond to the call of this other bird, possibly her mate. Emotion constricted my throat. I was so…..beyond sad…. thinking about the old platitude, not even a sparrow falls to earth without God knowing of it. I really doubt that, yet I wanted to believe that birds have affections and memories of their loved ones, they recognize and love individuals. The calling of the male goldfinch lifted my heart.

 

The suffering had been going on for some time, you see. I first noticed this bird from my kitchen window on Friday, the day before. It sat unmoving on the bird feeder, feathers fluffed, eyes closed…both bad signs. The other birds had flown away. Then it rained, and the bird managed to reach a low limb on the Japanese maple about 10 feet away. No shelter in the leafless tree, but apparently it spent the night there. Because Saturday, yesterday morning, I saw it on the tree still fluffed up and partially wet, but not preening. Birds always preen to put oil on the feathers to make them waterproof, their insulation against rain. I observe it tries to fly to the feeder, but gets no lift and lands in the grass beneath. I did not let the dogs out, but slowly approached it in the bright green grass, and gently picked her up. I considered what to place her on to be safe but not confined, and settled on a small flat ornamental feeder, shaped like a leaf with a bird perched on the rim. I added some spanish moss for padding like a nest, placed it on the step rail with the little bird in the middle. It could not sit up, its toes were curled, and it fell on its side. In struggling it became tangled in the moss, so I moved the moss aside. I envisioned the leaf an altar to nature, to the Great God Bird, symbolized by the inscrutable resin Bird.

 

And then began what I’d call the death throes. Spasms of seizures came at regular intervals, with moments of comprehension of its surroundings in between. I went for my iPad camera and managed to take some photos. The goldfinch became agitated when I clicked the still pictures, but the video made no noise, and it paid no attention to that. Was I cold hearted doing this? Should it die in peace, somewhere out of the way where nature takes its course. A cat eat it. A dove peck it to death. But I also had this compulsion to watch and to note the agonized passing of one of earth’s most exquisite life forms, a creature of the air. No life should pass unremarked, it should be Witnessed. We must see life and appreciate each life form's contribution to the diversity of our world. This small bird became to me the symbol of the loss occurring all over the world, of species and habitat and all diversity. That’s the way extinction looks, you know. When birds come in too close proximity to human beings, the birds—or any life form--always pays the price.

 

What better time to consider death and the hope of rebirth, than now, today, with the dying of Winter and the beginning of Spring. As Easter approaches with its promise of Rebirth.

 

Moving Memories // Paris #igersParis Four days ago was three months. Three days ago I sent an email. Two days ago I missed a call; asleep. Yesterday I missed a call; out walking the dog. Last night the Eagles of Death Metal bravely got up and performed in Paris again. Today I was up so could confirm my first therapy appointment for two days time. Shit happens, and we have to deal with it. There is such a huge attitude of platitude(s) these days, which can make one feel like it should take very little time or effort to improve. No. It doesn't work like that. Some things maybe, but not all. I understand this may be a long journey, I will know more on Friday. But right now, I am content. Days are good and I am no longer living in close to constant fear. I am grateful. I have changed though. My inner drive is no longer near, I cling to things and almost all I used to do I have halted. Not on purpose, it has just happened that way. I'm barely photographing, I'm barely writing, reading or even feeling. Thinking and doing yes, but for different reasons. I do things when I feel like it, no stress, no shoulda-coulda-woulda. I needed to stop and rest, and I have done and am doing exactly that. I have a little daily routine which has helped my sleep, my movements, and my mind. I do not pressure myself to do anything in particular, but rather wait and see what the day brings, for I barely know what day or date it is anyway. It may not sound like much, but my days pass, I have a certain sense of purpose, and things are getting better. ** Wherever I am, whatever I'm doing, Paris will always have a dear little place in my heart. It was a hole, but now it's healing, and the thought of going home is bringing back my feeling. It can be hard though, for the closer I get to happiness, the closer I am to where I was when life went from peak, peak happiness to the polar opposite - and that can at times make me wary. Still, I'm beginning to get excited for home; for family, for friends, for fun. ** The fact I didn't realise until the 14th that the 13th had passed, or what the 13th indeed means and meant, shows things may be beginning to move on, to mend. So for that I can smile. via Instagram ift.tt/1WstQsc

Top - AA

Pants - Made by my mom in the 80s

Socks - Nordstrom Rack - seriosuly the best socks in the world. Go get some.

Boots - Jeffery Campbell

Hat - Made by a friend

There is no "I" in "Team", but there are four in "Platitude-Quoting Idiot". George Carlin

Archie McPhee Special at Lifelong. Didn't buy.

mcphee.com/products/youre-the-star

  

i am

what i think

you think

i am.

 

i am small.

i contain platitudes.

 

i say the wrong things

i have OCD.

my obsessive compulsions are disorderly.

i say the wrong things, did i already say?

"A good way to repay a kindness shown is to pass it on."

 

One of Chennai's lovely quirks of public space are these series of inspirational and motivational wall slogans in several areas of the city. This sequence is from along GN Chetty Road in Chennai as you approach Gemini Flyover and is one of the longest stretches.

On June 5, a week ago, in the evening darkness, I drove by a grocery store. Outside, just a bit away from the main doors was a man sitting on the part concrete and part grass area. At first I just noticed him, and thought he might be a transient just sitting on the ground for a rest, or maybe having some food or drink. I was driving very slowly and noticed someone with him. He was feeding her! She wasn't real; she was a doll. He was acting like a little girl would act, feeding her dolly. I'm pretty sure he even had a spoon. It looked like it. I think he was sharing whatever food he was having.

 

I so wanted to get a picture of him and her, but was afraid to turn around, park to get closer etc. Also, asking someone in the daylight if it is OK to take their picture is one thing, but to risk a grown man's ire, alone, at night, something else. Something told me keep going and just remember the sight in my head and not in my camera. The rest of the way home, I was grumbling to myself, "I surely wish I had gotten that shot; it would have been so cool!"

 

The next morning, I woke up and one of my very first grumblings was about the same. Darn it; I really wanted that shot! I tried to console myself with my own little platitude. I said to myself, "Self, don't worry. There will be some other cool shot coming down the pike."

 

After lunchtime that day, I drove down the Main street of Springfield, Oregon, literally called Main St. Not exactly the same location of the man and the doll, but reasonably close by, I saw a doll rather carelessly tossed upon the lawn of some senior citizen apartment complex. I recognized her general size and shape, and turned around to get a shot of her. From this distance and angle that I was, she looked as if she might be really cute to fix up. It was clear to me two things, that she was the very same doll I saw the night before, and that she had been abandoned/discarded. There was no human even remotely close to her. I couldn't see much of her the night before except outlines, form and general size.

I was expecting her to be pretty or at least cute, like my large doll. I was shocked to see she had been horribly abused. I wondered if the man didn't like that she wouldn't actually eat what he was trying to share with her, or did he leave her in fine shape and someone else found her and took cruel liberties with her face and hair. I had no idea about the bubble looking thing on her mouth. Was it original to make it look as if she were chewing bubble gum, or was it glued on later? I hope it wasn't some sexual gadget of which I am happily naïve about. Did she already look that way when the man seated on the ground looked as if he were having a little nighttime picnic with her? Did he do that to her? If so, why? Did someone else do that, and was it before or after said picnic? Again, why? What , if any meaning, was there to the scribbling/graffiti on her face?

 

Some of you know I recently posted some photos of my large doll with her plaid pleated skirt. She reminds me of myself when I was a little girl. There is no way I would treat her like that. I also don't pretend to feed her, nor toss her away on Main Street.

 

;o) THE END

  

(DSCN2432WeirdSadAbusedDollflickr061217)

Last night I looked at the video and the still pictures I took of a dying goldfinch. I cried yesterday when she died. Tears course down my face now. I am still affected by her suffering and death. The little bird was having seizures and drawing backward, spreading its wings, and working its beak like it wanted to vocalize, but no sound came out. I think it got into something poisonous somewhere. That is how it struck me, the seizures were off and on, and in between it would be aware of my presence.

 

A brightly colored yellow goldfinch male came alone to the nearby feeder and remained there while I ministered to the other bird. I was standing one step down from the deck, with the little bird resting on a leaf-shaped container. The male was watching us, not attempting to eat from the feeder, but repeatedly CALLING to the little bird. I know that is what was happening, because the female went into a great responsive effort with beak opening and wings moving and body contorting. A supreme effort to respond to the call of this other bird, possibly her mate. Emotion constricted my throat. I was so…..beyond sad…. thinking about the old platitude, not even a sparrow falls to earth without God knowing of it. I really doubt that, yet I wanted to believe that birds have affections and memories of their loved ones, they recognize and love individuals. The calling of the male goldfinch lifted my heart.

 

The suffering had been going on for some time, you see. I first noticed this bird from my kitchen window on Friday, the day before. It sat unmoving on the bird feeder, feathers fluffed, eyes closed…both bad signs. The other birds had flown away. Then it rained, and the bird managed to reach a low limb on the Japanese maple about 10 feet away. No shelter in the leafless tree, but apparently it spent the night there. Because Saturday, yesterday morning, I saw it on the tree still fluffed up and partially wet, but not preening. Birds always preen to put oil on the feathers to make them waterproof, their insulation against rain. I observe it tries to fly to the feeder, but gets no lift and lands in the grass beneath. I did not let the dogs out, but slowly approached it in the bright green grass, and gently picked her up. I considered what to place her on to be safe but not confined, and settled on a small flat ornamental feeder, shaped like a leaf with a bird perched on the rim. I added some spanish moss for padding like a nest, placed it on the step rail with the little bird in the middle. It could not sit up, its toes were curled, and it fell on its side. In struggling it became tangled in the moss, so I moved the moss aside. I envisioned the leaf an altar to nature, to the Great God Bird, symbolized by the inscrutable resin Bird.

 

And then began what I’d call the death throes. Spasms of seizures came at regular intervals, with moments of comprehension of its surroundings in between. I went for my iPad camera and managed to take some photos. The goldfinch became agitated when I clicked the still pictures, but the video made no noise, and it paid no attention to that. Was I cold hearted doing this? Should it die in peace, somewhere out of the way where nature takes its course. A cat eat it. A dove peck it to death. But I also had this compulsion to watch and to note the agonized passing of one of earth’s most exquisite life forms, a creature of the air. No life should pass unremarked, it should be Witnessed. We must see life and appreciate each life form's contribution to the diversity of our world. This small bird became to me the symbol of the loss occurring all over the world, of species and habitat and all diversity. That’s the way extinction looks, you know. When birds come in too close proximity to human beings, the birds—or any life form--always pays the price.

 

What better time to consider death and the hope of rebirth, than now, today, with the dying of Winter and the beginning of Spring. As Easter approaches with its promise of Rebirth.

 

"A life lived for others is a life worthwhile."

 

One of Chennai's lovely quirks of public space are these series of inspirational and motivational wall slogans in several areas of the city. This sequence is from along GN Chetty Road in Chennai as you approach Gemini Flyover and is one of the longest stretches.

Fortune CEO Initiative

Four Seasons, Palm Beach, FL

Wednesday, November 2, 2022

5:45-6:20 CEOI TOWN HALL

NEW CAPITALISM: THE CHALLENGES OF RUNNING A SOCIALLY

CONSCIOUS COMPANY

Hosted by Workday

“Purpose and profit” is no longer a platitude, but a marching order from employees and customers. An empowered workforce, innovation from diversity, climate commitment, and what’s good for the community require the CEO’s attention as much as the financials. During this major shift in corporate ideology, CEOs must balance standing up for their values, and those of stakeholders, without being sucked into a quagmire of notoriety. What are the incentives for CEOs to act, beyond superficial fixes that might invite skepticism? How far is too far when speaking out on polarizing issues? How can we leverage CEOs’ power to create a sense of shared purpose?

Discussion Leaders:

Chano Fernandez, Co-chief Executive Officer, Workday

Tamara Lundgren, Chairman and CEO, Schnitzer Steel Industries

Brian Moynihan, Chairman and CEO, Bank of America

Penny Pennington, Managing Partner, Edward Jones

Moderator: Alan Murray, FORTUNE

Photographs by Rebecca Greenfield/Fortune

Type specimen poster of one of our favorite fonts set in one of our favorite platitudes.

Type specimen poster of one of our favorite fonts set in one of our favorite platitudes.

There is no "I" in "Team", but there are four in "Platitude-Quoting Idiot". George Carlin

Fortune CEO Initiative

Four Seasons, Palm Beach, FL

Wednesday, November 2, 2022

5:45-6:20 CEOI TOWN HALL

NEW CAPITALISM: THE CHALLENGES OF RUNNING A SOCIALLY

CONSCIOUS COMPANY

Hosted by Workday

“Purpose and profit” is no longer a platitude, but a marching order from employees and customers. An empowered workforce, innovation from diversity, climate commitment, and what’s good for the community require the CEO’s attention as much as the financials. During this major shift in corporate ideology, CEOs must balance standing up for their values, and those of stakeholders, without being sucked into a quagmire of notoriety. What are the incentives for CEOs to act, beyond superficial fixes that might invite skepticism? How far is too far when speaking out on polarizing issues? How can we leverage CEOs’ power to create a sense of shared purpose?

Discussion Leaders:

Chano Fernandez, Co-chief Executive Officer, Workday

Tamara Lundgren, Chairman and CEO, Schnitzer Steel Industries

Brian Moynihan, Chairman and CEO, Bank of America

Penny Pennington, Managing Partner, Edward Jones

Moderator: Alan Murray, FORTUNE

Photographs by Rebecca Greenfield/Fortune

"The urge to leave is very strong right now but I should probably stash money at this point."

 

"Why do you always want to leave?"

 

"It's what I'm good at, and sometimes it's better than staying."

 

"I know what happened was shitty but you can't build if you always take off."

 

"That's not true entirely, but I get your meaning."

 

"Do you though?"

 

"Well enough, but look if it's one of those days where you can't get up off the floor I don't know what to tell you. I mean, I've got extreme strength of will when need be and sometimes I can't push through. So it's like a slingshot, take that potential energy and use the leaving to propel you forward into something else."

 

"There's something to be said for the strength of holding on though."

 

"Sure, but no one gives medals for solemn platitudes."

 

"What about solemn platypuses?"

 

"I hate you."

 

"No you don't."

 

"No, I don't."

There is no "I" in "Team", but there are four in "Platitude-Quoting Idiot". George Carlin

de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binsenweisheit

 

rush (platitude) -> not working in englisch

T-shirt Design for Threadless

Medium: Illustrator, photoshop

client: Self

My design for the Threadless "Words of Wisdom" challenge.

Prints and other merch available at society 6:

society6.com/joshuakemble/Platitudes-Look-Awesome-With-Ea...

 

Vote for this to win on threadless by leaving your vote/comment at this link: www.threadless.com/wordsofwisdom/platitudes-look-awesome-...

Last night I looked at the video and the still pictures I took of a dying goldfinch. I cried yesterday when she died. Tears course down my face now. I am still affected by her suffering and death. The little bird was having seizures and drawing backward, spreading its wings, and working its beak like it wanted to vocalize, but no sound came out. I think it got into something poisonous somewhere. That is how it struck me, the seizures were off and on, and in between it would be aware of my presence.

 

A brightly colored yellow goldfinch male came alone to the nearby feeder and remained there while I ministered to the other bird. I was standing one step down from the deck, with the little bird resting on a leaf-shaped container. The male was watching us, not attempting to eat from the feeder, but repeatedly CALLING to the little bird. I know that is what was happening, because the female went into a great responsive effort with beak opening and wings moving and body contorting. A supreme effort to respond to the call of this other bird, possibly her mate. Emotion constricted my throat. I was so…..beyond sad…. thinking about the old platitude, not even a sparrow falls to earth without God knowing of it. I really doubt that, yet I wanted to believe that birds have affections and memories of their loved ones, they recognize and love individuals. The calling of the male goldfinch lifted my heart.

 

The suffering had been going on for some time, you see. I first noticed this bird from my kitchen window on Friday, the day before. It sat unmoving on the bird feeder, feathers fluffed, eyes closed…both bad signs. The other birds had flown away. Then it rained, and the bird managed to reach a low limb on the Japanese maple about 10 feet away. No shelter in the leafless tree, but apparently it spent the night there. Because Saturday, yesterday morning, I saw it on the tree still fluffed up and partially wet, but not preening. Birds always preen to put oil on the feathers to make them waterproof, their insulation against rain. I observe it tries to fly to the feeder, but gets no lift and lands in the grass beneath. I did not let the dogs out, but slowly approached it in the bright green grass, and gently picked her up. I considered what to place her on to be safe but not confined, and settled on a small flat ornamental feeder, shaped like a leaf with a bird perched on the rim. I added some spanish moss for padding like a nest, placed it on the step rail with the little bird in the middle. It could not sit up, its toes were curled, and it fell on its side. In struggling it became tangled in the moss, so I moved the moss aside. I envisioned the leaf an altar to nature, to the Great God Bird, symbolized by the inscrutable resin Bird.

 

And then began what I’d call the death throes. Spasms of seizures came at regular intervals, with moments of comprehension of its surroundings in between. I went for my iPad camera and managed to take some photos. The goldfinch became agitated when I clicked the still pictures, but the video made no noise, and it paid no attention to that. Was I cold hearted doing this? Should it die in peace, somewhere out of the way where nature takes its course. A cat eat it. A dove peck it to death. But I also had this compulsion to watch and to note the agonized passing of one of earth’s most exquisite life forms, a creature of the air. No life should pass unremarked, it should be Witnessed. We must see life and appreciate each life form's contribution to the diversity of our world. This small bird became to me the symbol of the loss occurring all over the world, of species and habitat and all diversity. That’s the way extinction looks, you know. When birds come in too close proximity to human beings, the birds—or any life form--always pays the price.

 

What better time to consider death and the hope of rebirth, than now, today, with the dying of Winter and the beginning of Spring. As Easter approaches with its promise of Rebirth.

 

There is no "I" in "Team", but there are four in "Platitude-Quoting Idiot". George Carlin

"Look for strengths in people, not weakness, for good, not evil. Most of us find what we search for."

 

This I might say is the best, least remembered advice given here.

 

One of Chennai's lovely quirks of public space are these series of inspirational and motivational wall slogans in several areas of the city. This sequence is from along GN Chetty Road in Chennai as you approach Gemini Flyover and is one of the longest stretches.

There is no "I" in "Team", but there are four in "Platitude-Quoting Idiot". George Carlin

A participant in the Trail of Self Determination sponsored by the American Indian Movement (AIM) is arrested at the old Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) building on Constitution Avenue July 6, 1976.

 

The group had asked for a tour of the old building, which at the time contained only a few BIA offices, but were turned down. Authorities offered small group tours of four, but the protesters turned it down as insulting.

 

Secretary of Interior Dennis Ickes gave the group of Native Americans ten minutes to vacate and then ordered the arrest of about 50 who did not move.

 

The Trail of Self-Determination was conceived by AIM as a way to challenge federal authorities and gain publicity for their demands during the nation’s Bicentennial celebration.

 

The car caravan began in Washington state with the Yakima nation and wound its way across the country in June 1976, gaining participants throughout the Northwest and Plains States—including the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux of South Dakota and the Wolf Point Sioux and Blackfoot of Montana.

 

The Trail group was accompanied by participants from El Centro de la Raza of Seattle. Robert Maestas said the Chicanos were providing support, but also are directly concerned with their own treaties -- the treaty rights in the 1948 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

 

The Native Americans who formed AIM were distrustful of many tribal chiefs whom they viewed as having sold out for power and money and acted as agents of repression on many of the reservations.

 

Clashes with federal authorities occurred throughout the 1970s, including at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and at the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in Washington, D.C.

 

While the Trail was being organized and underway, AIM leader Russel Means was shot and wounded for the third time, allegedly by a BIA police officer and it was revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had shared intelligence on a peaceful Native American protest in Bowling Green, Ky. with the Central Intelligence Agency.

 

The Trail of Self-Determination adopted the 20-point demands of the earlier Trail of Broken Treaties that occupied the BIA in Washington, D.C. in 1972.

 

The focus, however, was on economic self-determination: expanded land use rights, revision of mineral concessions and “permanent sovereignty over natural resources.”

 

The group of about 150 participants arrived in Washington, D.C. on July 3,, 1976 and set up encampments at an American University soccer field in Northwest Washington and at the Piscataway Indian Center in Waldorf and promptly held a demonstration at the U.S. Capitol.

 

Arnold Richardson, a local leader, said “Indians have nothing to celebrate. Our land has been stolen. We are under the racist rule of the BIA and we have had 200 people murdered since Wounded Knee.

 

On the July 4th Bicentennial, the group, their numbers having swelled to about 300, gathered in front of the White House to a beating drum demanding a meeting with President Gerald Ford and a joint session of Congress to establish a new system of Indian self-government.

 

There was little press coverage of the demonstrations much less their demands until Secretary of Interior Dennis Ickes ordered their arrest when they sought a tour of the old Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) building on Constitution Avenue.

 

Fifty-four of the group were arrested: 16 men, 16 women and 22 juveniles who refused to post the $10 collateral. The D.C. Corporation Counsel quickly dropped charges against all those arrested.

 

AIM spokesperson Dennis Banks said the group had been “politically attacked because they are Indians” and that the FBI had been spreading false rumors that the group intended violence.

 

Despite the arrests, the group met with BIA officials the next day and presented a plan for Native self-determination. The BIA officials offered platitudes, but deferred on specific demands saying that such proposals would have to be put forward through the existing tribal structure in order to be seriously considered.

 

At the campgrounds, participants gathered in a circle around the drums, sometimes calling out, sometimes dancing, sometimes chanting.

 

One participant said, “The drum is round like the continuity of life. It is a celebration of life.”

 

One of the favorites chants referring to Native Americans who sell out their people was:

 

I see an apple,

Red on the outside,

White on the inside,

Rotten to the core.

 

As the evenings wore on, the demonstrators would one-by-one leave the drum circle and head for the tall teepees made of pine poles and canvass—or hogans, lodges or tents—depending on where you came from

 

The group continued its daily White House demonstrations until late in the month when they broke camp and headed home—their demands largely lost in the press coverage of the larger U.S. Bicentennial celebration.

 

20-point AIM demands:

 

•Restoration of treaty making (ended by Congress in 1871).

•Establishment of a treaty commission to make new treaties (with sovereign Native Nations).

•Indian leaders to address Congress.

•Review of treaty commitments and violations.

•Unratified treaties to go before the Senate.

•All Indians to be governed by treaty relations.

•Relief for Native Nations for treaty rights violations.

•Recognition of the right of Indians to interpret treaties.

•Joint Congressional Committee to be formed on reconstruction of Indian relations.

•Restoration of 110 million acres of land taken away from Native Nations by the United States.

•Restoration of terminated rights.

•Repeal of state jurisdiction on Native Nations.

•Federal protection for offenses against Indians.

•Abolishment of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

•Creation of a new office of Federal Indian Relations.

•New office to remedy breakdown in the constitutionally prescribed relationships between the United States and Native Nations.

•Native Nations to be immune to commerce regulation, taxes, trade restrictions of states.

•Indian religious freedom and cultural integrity protected.

•Establishment of national Indian voting with local options; free national Indian organizations from governmental controls

•Reclaim and affirm health, housing, employment, economic development, and education for all Indian people.

 

For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHsmA7BHAZ

 

The photo is by Rosemary Martufi. The image is courtesy of the D.C. Public Library Washington Star Collection © Washington Post.