Pantomime
“Pantomime”—painting-in-progress, oil, acrylic, Oil-Stik, 24” x 24”. July, 2o24.
I wake with the feeling this morning as if it’s very important for me to keep moving, that movement is a kind of thinking that’s all my own, is, in some very real way, me.
Still, the temptation is to either take things seriously or not to care. Or is it the other way around?
I’m not sure that Freudian assessments—ego, id, superego—still make sense. Are they passe?
For some reason this morning I seem to recall the Christian Science practitioner who could heal anyone within a 20-mile radius of her office. Her name was Margie, plump with blonde hair. Margie always smiled, no matter the situation. Death didn’t exist, only life after death existed. Margie had an uncanny way of finding parking places that were otherwise occupied through prayerful devotion, the honest devotion to her thought made that achievement possible, or so Christian Scientist’s seemed to believe.
On second thought, perhaps Margie was really a witch with supernatural powers.
When I came of age, age 15 or so, I started to believe that Christian Science had run out of healings and that acquiring a parking space in a crowded city was a matter of being lucky or not lucky.
*****
Still awake, I’m reading the late George Steiner’s book Grammars of Creation (Yale U. Press, 2001) The discourse is dense, Steinerarian, regarding beginnings and ends, so many woven in, Mallarme, Heidegger, Kandinsky, Beckett, Hegel, Shakespeare, on and on. It’s a feast, but a bit difficult to keep up with, at times an essay on his own erudition. I can’t get a straight answer as Steiner moves through his heroes and villains. The reader is more or less carried along by Steiner’s musings: “The work of art, of poetics, carries within it, as it were, the scandal of its hazard, the perception of its ontological caprice” (p. 29).
I venerate time. What else is there to praise, or to condemn? I wonder: what I am doing with time and what I am doing without it? Time is always the measure; second place is money. And celebrity is the bridesmaid of capitalism.