Notes on Dimensional Time [The Trial of Jim Dandy][Chapter 5, Part 1 (Cont’d)]

[Notes on Dimensional Time]
The Trial of Jim Dandy
Chapter Five [Part 1, cont’d]

History is sand, paint, Granma’s attic and desert mounds with bowls of rice in the walls. I know the thinkers and wise folk display a seeming inexhaustible penchant for mulling the how’s and what-for’s of time playing out in the affairs of people. Carving what happened into stone or printing it on paper hadn’t helped much. Wax and a stylus has failed against war and style in the arena of commemoration, I would say. History - is it fungible and immaterial, or is it a serial episode unfolding, maybe progressing or spiraling, or folding upon itself? If there’s a mightier question for the ages, I wouldn’t know what it would be. The chicken and egg is the synopsis of history, and histrionics is the technique of drama. The telling of a tale is like the spark between the synapsis, and electricity might be the energy of all memorial transmission. If lightning dances across the clouds then is gone away forever unique, and people dance on the earth that will consume their dead skin, is this not a puzzle that touches everything that moves, is and was? What’s the point of this ghostly reel a mind rightly would prefer to comprehend, if for solace, if nothing else. “Oh, this is how it always was,” we all might prefer to proclaim, but to my eye not a thing I see is twice identical. A baby’s not born with a history embedded, or else who would need a teacher? Yet science would tell us we’re encoded by invisible history in our very cells, beyond sight, beyond mind, or at least the cheese of it. But you and I both are keen to the fact that one answer is in all probability as fine as the next one. Maybe that’s bad thinking, but estimates are not hard evidence, and where’s the evidence of history forever? Evidence is all around us and in us, yes, I suppose, but of the “always,” I defy you, amigo, to point it out to me satisfactory. You could call time a machine, and travel back to dinosaurs, when you’re H.G. Wells or some sci-fi visionary, but to live a first kiss over again, is never as facile. Whether it’s C.E. Shannon and Mendel, or Turing and Nazi codes, the time machine evolving is like a house of mirrors, and answers come freely like assholes and get on with it. Who wouldn’t take surety over uncertainty? Nostalgia, though, kills truth as sure as an arrow. Fantasy, like red warriors downriver jaunting, by canoe and foot, til an end either celebrated for a while, or not, won’t help you much on the avenues of the Bronx. Three hundred years and a few miles of concrete is quite a distance to traverse to trade beads or eat pizza slices. Ivanhoe or the Last of the Mohicans, subterfuge and romance, the storyteller prescribes the antidote for senselessness. Fine. That’s okay for fiction, I guess, but tell that to a mommy who’s lost her baby to typhoid or polio or a thousand maladies asides, any one of which is enough, or a child who’s lost his brother to a needle or a the waves, or any number of relations in life’s final abandon greeting and moaning, doing calculus to figure out the arc of a first breath to a last, in the twixt of which affection attached. Thinking may fail, though familiarity deadens the emotions, in the interventions of death on the remaining. The remains of the departed being another matter altogether. How long does the carcass of a whale on a beach take to stop stinking to high heavens? Whether you like Mozart fashion a Requiem Mass, or feed the vultures with the ashen flesh of your loved ones, as they do in the Himalayas, where a frozen corpse might never rot, if it’s high enough, the rituals of demarcation between the worlds of living and dead are as diverse as the earth itself and her minions. I can’t say I cotton to any particular methodology of bodily disposal, preferential as I am to holding to the green side of the dirt for as long as I’m able. Circumstances will encroach on avoidance over time. I haven’t til now given it much thought, but then I’m no philosopher. Experience and the anecdotal are my allies against history. I can cast my mind like a fishline into the water of memories and always catch a bit to pull in to the shores of shared awareness. See now. I can picture the little white painted house with the green pitched roof, the windows not often lit, but then I mostly visited in the daytime. It’s Granma’s house, on a hill, of course, next to the library and above the gymnasium. I would sit on her couch and she in her chair. Now and again we would sit at the keys and play chopsticks together, me poor and she patient, encouraging. The memories now are more feeling than visual, but I do recall the ashtrays, and shadowy impressions of the wallpaper or was it the carpet. The dining room table. The refrigerator. The sodas inside. The tinkling ice in the glass. Her smile, and Highland eyes. Tall, like a tree on a mountain, but graceful, like a deer or a swan. I don’t care if that’s embellishment, or that I neglected to mention the wry twinkle about her, or the fact I seldom visited her at the last in the hospital with the others. When Granma passed away, my father and brothers and me cleaned out her attic, afflicted I suppose in our grief. The A-frame pinnacle of Granma’s little house hid a trove of collectibles, for which few would find value. Our mission is the task of many a family of survivors, countless throughout history, equal parts puzzle and rendering. Few tasks are as arduous, or long-lasting in consequence. It’s not a wonder that some societies advise burning what’s left. Maybe that’s always the more sensible remedy. Otherwise, the burden of things becomes great on us beasts of the fields, by which I mean us, mankind, by our default. The notion of property ever distorts the cycle of human continuity. Affections only heighten the banality of cataloging the possessions of a body laid to rest in the cold dark ground of the hills in the shade of a vertical incised slab. Maw was beloved by all who knew her, I would say. Hundreds of hundreds attended her funeral and wake, and procession, in a side of the world where such crowds are specially rare. If the numbers are inflated as the years accumulate, the sin of exaggeration should be forgiven, for love is love. Shared love the stronger. When a shell of a life lived is left behind, meaning the home of the person gone to the Maker, as they say, the wood, stone and glass in short-order won’t be wasted. The hardscrabble realities of country living assure it. Scavengers attend remains, and the stuff is shared and divided. By tearful family, by ever-ravenous and -craven banksters, by darting-eyed opportunists, by passersby, who- and whatever. Granma’s house I’ve heard tell is occupied by new people, now, and by now the replacements have been replaced, and again and again. Occupation of home serially is much like a war on history. What did these subsequent ones know of her or us, of my father’s childhood, of the dreams and Granma’s piano, her cheese glop, her Cokes, her chocolates, her smokes, her smiles, and her television? Less and less each iteration, most likely, until naught at all. Back then, after climbing the rickety drop-down ladder, we boys in Granma’s musty attic, through the fog of our private and combined grief, each of us discovered a facet of her doings, or interests, and affections. There wasn’t much, thank God, but that was Maw. One found a gun, which we all marveled at and plotted for, leading to other adventures for another story. One foraged and hollered upon discovery of some other forgotten treasure, photos I believe. For the camera had become of age in the span of Granma’s days. My father had embraced it as an attachment of its own, to any gathering of the tribe, and his mother to a lesser degree before him. Album upon album, and now both she and he have joined our ancestors in the mists of yore. Whether the Kodachrome echoes of moments captured proved any hedge against the onset of their twilights, I couldn’t venture a guess, other than in the negative. Father compiled a substantial archive of photos, mounted on stiff pulp, bound by glue, string and black enveloped corners, specified by captions hand-written in his fashion. At the last, he took none with him to the final rest. Sure, we revisit them, and ponder the smiles and settings, but for what reason, in death’s misapprehension? Is history to be chemistry, sandwiched between pages of coffee table books? I would conjecture that this contrivance will decompose as do all others, for what longevity has paper compared to carved stone or spoken word. Somewhere in the middle, I’d put it. In the dust of that sequestered space of Granma’s house-top cave, I chanced upon two or three framed prints, which later I would paint over again and again, as an artist, applying layer upon layer of opacities and translucencies, building surface finger-thick, eventually. I can’t now hardly recall what was on the un-original originals. A ship. A town. A still life with flowers, mayhaps. From then for a long time these artifacts were my travel companions, from stop-place to the next. Where I painted them on the road in my course was far from the quiet street where Maw’s house stands, now someone else’s property, a stranger’s worry and attachment or asylum. Wherever I worked on Granma’s paint-adorned, dimensionally modified reproductions of some other paint-throwing projectionist’s devise, framed in the simple manner of Scotland or the hills, my painting was a conduit of a complexity, of impressions and reflections, on Granma, on home, on the nature of our being here or there, and then gone. They became a ceremony. Was one of them prints under glass throughout preserved? I cant recollect. I’m sure I don’t remember the paints or brushes I used, where they came from, though probably I should, but it was long ago and the works completed and themselves gone, to another home’s walls, then a closet or later the garbage bin I guess. Was it house paint I used, and horse hair strung to a stick? The paint itself became a condition to be satisfied. Gathering the materials. The color, the medium, water or oil. Cleaning the paint tip, or forgetting. The sticky surface soiling bags and clothes and anything else it contacted, leaving evidence, a trial some art detective could decipher, in some fiction. Who cares about art that much? Sometimes a painter has to leave in a hurry! I managed to bring all three to the finish, despite escapes and foul weather and beasts a-stalking. Granma’s triptych took shape over some seven years. Why seven and not two? Who knows? It takes what it takes, as they say. I wouldn’t say I procrastinated, but life has a way of getting in the way of art, don’t it? Process is agrarian, in the dimensional method. I would inform you that the process is additive. Oh, yeah, once in a while I might scrape away a mess, or sand down the thing, but all in all, even that is positive in the scope of the object forming specifically. Metaphor for process is more poetry than manual instruction, but throughout history the poetry of art is the chronicling of the metaphorical evolution of translation. I don’t mean critique, which is by and large useless, in a progressive complex. Only after the fact is a critic worthwhile and not distorting, and then only when he’s correct and sans agenda, that is, almost never. Not to put any geezer out of a job, and free speech always has good value, but a critic isn’t necessarily a proponent of liberty. More often than not the critic is an extra hand in a kitchen too small to begin with. But the painting, on the other hand, is unadulterated honest. By that I mean the sort of truth that is beyond the visible. The dimensional painting accrues, one pigmented plane consumed by the next, like a village in a flat desert, swallowed by sand, upon which another congregation of souls rises, passes, is buried, and another collective coalesces, is covered up by the elements, and so on, until the visible progression assumes the appearance of a strange mountain artificially cloaking the hidden past, upon which the unknowing live atop the forgotten. I insert the memory of the Southwestern expanses, or the Mideast, where the little nomads hid scrolls in caverns away from the burning sun and other enemies of soft wet stuff. How does Granma enter the image? I don’t know. They were none of them portraits, the finished pieces. The art negated the loss of her to me, with at least one agent of knowing, namely the artist, me. There ought to be one, not affecting the grim objectivity of science, but instead letting the object itself be the celebration, or grim, as the subject or content should dictate. The power of art is here, perhaps, between the Me and the Artist, Object and Granma’s prints become new paintings, independent of both her and me, free of our suffering and celebration, free at last of us, and forever linked simultaneous. Like a pie, either tasty or not. Which is not the same as picking bones. Natural history is often unnatural, if not mysterious, no? Archeology is the science of deciphering the phenomena of emptied vessels, of restoring the chronology of humanity’s comings and goings, and attributing the shading effects that the superficial ignores in its occupations and currency. But archeologists croak too, and their anthropologist colleagues, too, and death for either is uniformly natural. Artificiality is a conundrum in the architecture of time. Digging destroys or at least disrupts the now for a painting in dimension, as it does for a layered city. I wouldn’t presume to assign a psychological reduction to the enterprise, but intuition whispers in my mind’s ear, just the same. Freud’s dead, but the other one paints portraits deader than any photograph, as useless to an archeologist as to an anthropologist. Only the bankers and the brokers make out, or the princes in their castles of ownership. Violent dust as much a lie as any other definition of slavery. Fuck them, bro. They’ll never get it, in their delusions of grand preservation. Fuck them. My intent was transformational. Theirs is provisional, and vanity. If life is a bracketed timeline, preceded by the vacuum of potential or absence of notation, accomplishment and actuality, and followed by projection, evaluation and mortal decay or loss of presence, then the act of memorializing is an act of perpetuation for the evolution of the deceased as animation. A nail on the wall for a wire. One house, structurally is no better than the next in a storm that washes away all before it, and this is history. A ghost is a hybrid of time-based soul in a body. Art is an instrument of furthering life, and maybe that’s dangerous ground, akin to sorcery, like the Pharoah’s pyramids. I have to stop now, I’m tired.