Did I mention that I’ve been rereading some Jack Kerouac? I read The Dharma Bums over the last couple of weeks, and am working on Tristessa and Desolation Angels now.
Jack was a great gloopy nut, a fanatic wordsmith, a one-man army of the night.
Publishing obscene Etruscan odes on the dumpsters of yuppie Californee.
I’m happy to be out and about with my camera again. Seeing things more clearly.
I was tired of photography last week, I was preoccupied by a (fortunately) temporary health problem. Today I’m starting to feel like myself again. Off and on I have this sense of rebooting.
Like looking at the brake light on my car, I’m all, “Ah, yes, the brake light. An electrical filament illuminating a hard plastic lens.” I mean, I knew what the light was, sure, but last week I’d dropped the maintenance routines of daily facts like that, I was too busy worrying.
But, yeah, I’m back, and all the little niggling objects are still here, all wanting their attention share. The radio remote control, the knitting basket, the glasses cases, my three pairs of glasses, my hair, my clothes, the pillow, the lamps, the food in the fridge. It’s like the world is this array of male and female snaps, and I’m a plastic sheet of female and male snaps that need to be matched up with the reality array. The lights flow through me, and my piezoplastic wriggles. Yubba gleep.
Looking around Borders Books today, I was thinking about what kinds of memoirs get published. David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs have a whole thing going with rueful tales of personal dysfunction. Back in the 1930s, Robert Benchley, James Thurber and Dorothy Parker were doing something similar. That’s not exactly my bag, the Kerouac quest account is a little closer to what interests me.
Another angle is to present yourself as the Witness to History—for me, this might be the Silicon Valley thing or the cyberpunk thing, though people aren’t responding much to SV idea when I suggest it. It’s like people are sick of Silicon Valley. Maybe if I could clearly cast the memoir as evocations of a bygone era—which certainly it would be. As I’ve mentioned before, in this context, I think of the Vanished Wild West. But I could spin it as the Godfather of Cyberpunk thing.
The point of writing this would be to entertain myself, and to gain a bit more self-knowledge here in the Desert of the Real. To have some fun. I can’t face grinding away on another novel right now. But yet, I do want to write.
Winding up our Wild West road trip, we visited daughter Isabel with her husband and new dog Rivers in Pinedale, Wyo. Rivers is a cute li’l guy.
They have nice old stringed instruments hanging on the wall.
We went canoing on Green River Lake near Squaretop Mountain. We parked the canoes in some reeds and hiked into the back country to spend a night.
I love the big granite rocks in the flowing mountain streams. It’s kind of Zen, the stillness and the motion yoked together.
We found a great Forest Service bridge made of two logs. Somehow you wouldn’t see a pristine bridge like that in California. It would be whipped or vandalized somehow.
Where we camped there was this lovely flat river winding across the high valley, a series of S-curves with the range in back.
We boiled water for dinner; you can use an empty tin can for his light-weight cooking pan.
Rivers was only two months old, but he was very competent at getting around. Like you wouldn’t let a two-month old human baby romp around on a cliff edge!
Isabel managed to climb Squaretop last summer, it took them two tries. It was hard for to find the way up to the top, none of her friends had ever been. Everyone was like, “walk up the back,” but that leads to a dead end. You have to climb the side. Now we know!
I saw some really big ants by the lake. This picture’s pretty blurred but I SmartSharpened the hell out of it with PhotoShop.
Our last night in Pinedale we had supper at Fremont Lake and went up on the ridge for the sunset to see the glistening ponds. I love Wyoming.
The text for today’s post is excerpts from a June 14, 1997, journal entry. I just figured out how to link to specific pages of PDF files, so my lifebox weave can be that much more detailed now!
The entry I’m quoting was written up while I was doing some field rsearch for my out of print but still available novel Saucer Wisdom — in 1997, I actually flew all the way to Devil’s Tower looking for (and finding) the inspiration to finish the book (and stayed with Dick Termes.)
The pictures are from my second trip there, this Juneteenth (I like the vagueness of that useage), 2008, along with a couple of pictures from Rt. 14a through the Big Horn mountains and from the Thumb Lake geyser pool in Yellowstone.
Approaching Devil’s Tower I was excited, thinking about the approach to it in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, how the GOVERNMENT has barricaded off the tower and is trying to keep YOU AND ME from seeing the MAGIC. How persistent and attractive this myth is. The GOVERNMENT stands for what — superego? Mental blocks? I was sharing in the Close Encounters of the Third Kindfeeling bigtime myself, thinking things like “I’m breaking through, I’m going all the way, nobody is gonna stop me.”
My head feels funny from looking at Termes art all evening. Things are like flipping around. And I am living inside a Termes icosahedron—-did I mention that? I’m sleeping in an icosohedral cupola on top of his Bucky-Fuller-dome art gallery. What a wonderful place to be.
I stop and read a marker just as the Tower came first into view. There’s an Indian legend that the Devil’s Tower is that way because a bear clawed it. It’s about 800 ft from base to top. On the radio is that old metal band, Great White, playing “Once Bitten Twice Shy.” Really some fairly convincing sounding Stones riffs in there. Though later I heard the real Stones doing “Beast of Burden,” and you remember that Keith doesn’t just play “Stones riffs,” he plays beautiful tasty surprising things.
The Tower was scored with beautiful smooth grooves. Large grooves. The thing is really a bundle of columns. The columns are hexagonal, sometimes pentagonal, maybe thirty feet across. I suspect that they formed as Bernard convection cells in the quiescently cooling magma. The tower itself is only about 60 columns wide.
I took a path around it, got quite close to the base, though just when was going to touch the thing itself there were some climbers directly overhead and I worried they would kick stone down on me and I felt their yells were disapproving directed at me for being there, a non-climber. I vaporized them with a femtoray. The blocks of stone at the base are called talus.
Incessant wind. Striking animals I saw: chipmunk, red squirrel, yellow swallowtail butterflies, snake, white-tail deer, a quail, prairie dogs. The snake looked so armless. The red squirrel running up a twisty pine tree: it fits, the squirrel fits the tree, the two of them fit my perceptions of what I should see.
We are all DNA, we are all part of the same wetware world. We humans were going by mostly in male-female pairs, couples going around together, why do couples do that so much? Is it from the nesting instinct? He is showing her places she can safely breed their pups?
I went off the trail, just like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, at the base of the Tower. How terribly isolated it seemed for that guy at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I think he’d made a huge mistake, going all alone into the giant utility research kitchen of the saucer, the soulless stainless foodless kitchen. But WHOAH before you know it, maybe a door’ll spring open and there will be bloody crazy grinning turncoat human in an alien chef’s hat made of human skin with big toque ears, like the guy in my fen-ignored-but-still-online story, “The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club.”
Sitting there I imagine that a knot of roots is a spider the size of my fist. “My throat grew raw with screaming.”
Near the Belle Fourche River was a pavilion and they were having an event celbrating a book called Leaning Against The Wind, and I heard some women reading things that were in it. I later learned that it’s an anthology of writings by women of the High Plains states. The woman I heard said something about how she and her man had been called low-lifes, for not having cows, but she can see them in the stockyard near her house, she works in the stockyard. Of someone in her family: “He became a successful salesman of cow products.” I naturally wonder: Cows harvested by the aliens?
I drove home through the rolling fields so green, a back road. Thunder storms and then a tornado warning on the radio. Great slashing lines of lightning, some fractal line then gets lit multiple times pulse pulse pulse as the energy courses down the superheated air highway.
R.e. the Midwest, this morning I was getting supplies for the day at Safeway, and I thought of the repetition of the endless Midwestern Safeways by the interstates, the Safeways and their identically polite checker girls with Norwegian oooo sounds in their speech. And the repetition of the old farmers and farmwives, spry and cantankerous, making the best of things. The endless glut of us humans repeated over and over with the same expressions and opinions, we are like a field of flowers, all of us more or less the same — well, why not, that’s how fields of flowers are, all the same, and it’s just a Romantic error to expect the windrows of humanity to be anything other than fields of people, the same pattern duplicated and reduplicated, Nature likes repeating herself.
BUT, anent the aliens, as I thought of the flower-flesh I could see the deep disinterest which the aliens would have in us, and how shallow our imagined differences would be relative to them, a slight bend of one petal, it’s still just another buttercup, the aliens must have as deep a don’t-care as my feeling on seeing yet another squirming black cricket in the clods of the field I walked across the morning, past the rotting bodies of the road-kill deer, laid out for the scavenger American Eagles, and no I won’t be stopped from telling this True Story, and you reading this, yes, you aren’t letting Them stop you, you’re in the Big Time now.
We visited my friend Dick Termes in Spearfish, South Dakota. He’s an amazing artist, he paints on spheres instead of on flat canvases. He calls his works Termespheres.
In this shot of him in his studio, you can see his “easel” which is a cloth-draped ring resting on an armature that rises up and down and rotates. It holds the sphere in progress.
In the background is a new kind of sphere he’s working on, one in which there are transparent windows through which you can see into the interior. He paints a (slightly) different inward-pointing image beneath the outward pointing image.
The best way to understand these works is to look at a video of some rotating Termespheres:
It’s really remarkable how the perspective seems to go into the spheres. You may also notice sometimes that your mind “reverses” the perspective, so that the sphere looks concave rather than convex. Note that when this happens, the sphere seems to rotate the other way. How does he create these works?
Termes’s painting method consists of getting a spherical canvas, standing in front of it, and painting onto the canvas what you see on the other side of the sphere, in front of you. Termes does not work by painting what is behind him onto the sphere, all the while looking over his shoulder. He paints what is in front of him. Once he has finished a patch corresponding to what is in front of him, how does he add what is, say, to the left of the patch in front of him? He moves around the sphere to the right a little so that he is now looking directly at the area that was formerly to the left. And he rotates the sphere to the right so as to expose the blank part of the sphere canvas to the left of what he already painted.
Mathematically, this is equivalent to central projection of the world onto the inner surface of the sphere, followed by eversion. By eversion I mean this: turn the sphere inside out. This way the correctly projected image which was visible from the inside is now visible from the outside.
If you were to try and do this yourself, you’d probably end up with a mess. Termes’s other innovation is that he has developed a “six-point” form of perspective that allows him to organize what he paints on the sphere.
In 1997, I spent three or four days visiting Termes, sleeping in this polyhedral dome on top of his gallery, doing research for my novel Saucer Wisdom, which has it’s final scenes in Spearfish and at the nearby Devil’s Tower, Wyoming. I have a journal entry about this trip in my Saucer Wisdom Notes PDF online.
When I returned last week, an amazingly violent thunderstorm came through during the night. Dick said the Black Hills of SD are known for their thunderstorms and that, although the Native Americans would hunt there, they preferred to sleep away from the hills in the grasslands.
He assures me that the stellated icosahedron on the dome above his gallery is grounded.
Termes is a real old-master kind of artist, it was great just to look at his brushes. Seeing him again gave me some ideas about how to round out my Bosch character in Hylozoic. Termes is very excited and enthused about his work, and I can imagine that Bosch was too.
While we were in Sioux City, SD, we visited a four-foot diameter Termesphere on display in the Sioux City convention center. Termes has gotten a number of public art commissions over the years.
He has a gallery built on to his house, with a zillion decorated spheres dangling from the ceiling. You can go online to see what’s for sale .
Prices range from about $5000 to $20000 in the gallery but there are also some silk screened spheres for $200. If people want the actual price for a specific piece Dick will email that to them or talk to them on the phone. About half of his pieces are done on commission, and on these, the prices vary according to what the patron wants.
He’s into polyhedra too, and at one time was working with a system he calls “Total Photography” for mapping sets of photos onto polyhedra. His online store sells a variety of low-cost reproductions, such as paintings on polyhedra.
Naturally his house is all made of domes, that’s the living room ceiling in the picture of the polyhedron mobile. It’s very cozy in there. The spherical ceiling has this odd property of focusing sounds, so that if you sit at the right distance from Termes, it’s like he’s talking into your ear.
Those gold decoration-type balls in the studio picture above are waiting to be coated with gesso and used as “sketch paper”! Whenever Dick runs across mass-produced spheres at a good price he gets a bunch of them; he says the big Xmas balls at K-Mart make good “canvases.”
Thinking about the amazing achievements of Dick Termes — as compared to the relative obscurity in which he works — I recall a remark that Jorge Luis Borges made in an essay about the writer Herman Melville.
Vast populations, towering cities, erroneous and clamourous publicity have conspired to make unkown great men one of America’s traditions.
