EHYEH ASHER EHYEH

Man. This is tougher than I expected. I had shoulder surgery in September. They clipped and shortened my collar bone. They detached and moved the tendon that holds my bicep. They used a grinder on the ball joint to smooth the damage of the arthritis I never knew I had. They clipped cartilage and joined tears.

Now it's two months and two days since the surgery and my right shoulder still blazes with pain. I have to lift it with my left arm to rest it on a shelf or reach into the cabinet. It's especially bad while I'm doing the physical therapy exercises I've been taught. But usually, for a few hours after PT I have a blissful break from the pain. They say another nine or ten months lie ahead before normalcy may return. 

I can still only raise my hand and arm to chest level without having a device or person lift it higher. Even then it shakes wildly and the pain is of a depth and intensity certain among us pay big bucks for in Vegas. Hell, even breakfast oatmeal is a comic trial. I bend to chase the spoon with my mouth open like a weak-necked chick trying to meet the dripping gruel  between tremors. I look like a borscht belt slapstick chasing the bouncing, wagging spoonful of mush.  Usually I end breakfast spending unhappy time in the bathroom washing the unfortunate decorations of breakfast from my beard.

And so I wait. I cannot paint. I am making finishing touches to a large skyscape that requires such small and irregular marks that for this small but extremely important process the tremors are actually a useful tool. Maybe. But wide sweeping movements and elegant tiny arabesques are lost to me for months. They say they will "probably" come back. After the atrophied muscles of my right lats re-grow, become more than the stringy, fan shaped film that now stretches uselessly over blade and ribs.  They're there to pull against the tendons of the shoulder and arm, they hold the scapula in place, lock it down to give anchorage to my upper arm and shoulder and make a fulcrum upon which my muscles may lever and raise my scrawny arm.

It is an agon, a trial of devotion and will. I am without my primary tool. My arm. I am filled with images, large sweeping images of shredding grey Tuscan sky and wan figures draped in soiled fabrics, dirty faced. The most extraordinarily beautiful man, a rising rock star drummer has consented to be my Lucifer. Not the lost mangled beast of Christian children's nightmares, but he of eastern legend, the Eastern Star, God's most beloved of the all angels. But I cannot move, cannot flit across the huge canvas making the tiny flowing marks and large, florid arabesques that over time and wild process will weave and meld together into a smooth and sensual surface of intense and lurid, beautiful colors. The colors of passion and desire and longing...and loss and pain and of my once shattered heart, colors more fluent than words.

My beautiful first choice for Lucifer, my adored and magically beautiful Arab pearl is likely gone. He who would've been my Lucifer - and my muse, subject of a hundred paintings - he seems lost to me. Haughty with just reason, handsome and fulsome and achingly beautiful with eyes of black pearl set off by stunningly dark, thick lashes. But lesser beauty, it seems, will have to suffice, perhaps even to bring out greater beauty in paints. Beauty is easy to mimic, finding the beauty within the paint and the text is a greater and richer challenge. At least for now I must pretend it to be so.

But for now they are all nothing more than a codex of unattainable images. The year of hell continues. My own little annus horribilis. Another surgery comes next week. Again a doctor says "Now this is a long recovery. And it's going to be painful." Another month of enforced sloth. Another month or two without holding my brushes and sweeping across the fabric with umbers and cobalts and cads. Sloth is deadly hell for a Scot. 

I feel damned. I feel like Lucifer. Lucifer whose hell is the utter and absolute absence of his lover, I my paints. Whose hell is the sound of his lover saying "Be away from me forever." Punished for something I do not know I have done. Tested? Like Job? Am I to bear with equanimity this curse of having my painting ripped from me? Am I to pretend to be blessed while tears stream from my eyes when the therapist pushes me, urging me to drive through the pain and rebuild my recalcitrant shoulder's ability to move? I don't know. I only know I am tired and I cannot paint. The thing that makes me who I am is cut off from me. I am cut off from my lover - my paints, my canvas.

So it is that it is. "Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh" says Yahweh - "I will be that I will be." And so must I. Whether I struggle and wail or go limp and submit to this gentle, brief death I have no choice. I cannot paint as I paint. But I am filled with images and so, later, I will spit them up, vomit them or coax them gently, lovingly up from within me when I am again complete. But now, today, I am tired and I have so much more to come. 

VOTE FOR ME! SORRY...GOD ASKED ME TO SAY THAT

Gad, it's been so long. So much going on. My own strange endocrine malady grinds on - shriveling little nubby bits here and there inside me that would squirt useful juices were they not so thoroughly undone; being chipper, mugging and capering for the Alzheimer's one in my life, being grim and agreeing that "yes, the country HAS gone to hell" with the irascible one, organizing a support group for a couple going through cancer together, gave a museum lecture - that was fun, a few large canvases in a little show, too. Right now I'm organizing and directing a frothy sculpture invitational competition for polyurea based sculptures which will float in our trickling downtown river. Art can certainly bring out the prissy in some. Oh, getting two articles written about me, that's cool. One just for a university publication, but the other is a magazine. It's made of shiny paper and so it is more important.

I've lost another inch since the last time I posted, fortunately it was from my spine and not something I'd be REALLY upset about. I mean, jesus, this makes four and a half inches in five years. Mister Stumpy! So... I've resigned myself to taking the awful, monthly, poison pill my Dr has given me. Lovely stuff to fix crumbling bones. "Often results in extreme bone and muscle pain, also associated with spontaneous hip fractures." ...And there's the starter's gun and he's .....down? Oh, it was just his hip snapping in two as he stood still in from of the easel.

Oh, and how could I forget....my house! Listing ever more seriously to port, it is now being stripped, ripped and beaten into the upright and foursquare. I am interred in the last untouched room, once bright now a crowded barrow, dark and threatening where I'm surrounded by gap mouthed brown boxes in towers and mounds deep and tall. They all glower at me, resentful of me, of the one who brought this burden upon them. These dust laden boxes in heaps stacked and teetering, slouching beneath their loads in clusters all around the great room - the only room left to me - like little, post-apocalyptic shanty towns frightened of others, leaning threateningly at me, staring out blank-faced at me, at that guy who's not one of us. They have me trapped, under siege and they wait. They want my bed. That's it. Yeah, it's here in the last room with me now, too. They want to sully the crisp white sheets of my faithful four-poster bed. They want to consume it, bury it under their ugly papery bottoms. Desecrate the memories resting in my former now lamented and beached Puerto Rican Party Barge. My once raucous battleship of lust and rage where my misspent youth finally somehow ended - limply, softly giving in to it's flaccid doom.

My studio has been closed to me for weeks, now. I have enough space for my students and shoo the workers away while I teach. But, I can't paint with the workmen overhead dropping clouds of dust and firing away furiously with nail guns. Nail guns. I think Dick Cheeeney invented them. They're powered by red, squatting, round air compressors that recharge themselves with thundering motorized farts of volcanic decibel levels not heard since Vesuvius cut the one that pasted Pompey. What's worse - there are two of the infernal things so they recharge at differing times...rudy, foul mechanical toads loudly brrrrrripping at each other across the murky pond of my sanity.

Soon it will all be done, though. I figure eight, 12 weeks at the most and we can start a draw down of the troops. Raising the roof of the garage to 16ft and moving the studio out there will be the end game.

Well.....to those of you safely outside "Fortress USA" give us a thought and a prayer if you practice such crafts. It's election season when all the intelligent people hide and the toothless mobs with pitchforks and blood in their eyes take over the joint on behalf of Jesus and his Pop. Sheesh....what fresh hell are we!?

Later peeps!