September 9, 2019

Images
Body

Rainy Monday night in Southwest Minneapolis and I was going to write something and then I thought I just felt unwell from my neuropathy which has been worse lately. The condition arises from my nerve damage when I suffered my fall last year and broke my neck and both wrists. The surgeon said it would take three years for the nerves to find new connections apparently the time frame was shorter in the past but neurologists have now discovered it takes longer to heal or to know a final outcome. The feeling is a lot like sunburn it comes and goes in my neck and back shoulders and in my wrists and arms, It is awfully intense at times I treat it with Tylenol sometimes that makes it calm down and let’s me sleep. Now that I have been more active with my device and wheelchair it seems to be more intense than ever. I also can feel it kick in when I draw and paint, it seems to have stress component too. When my spouse and I have trouble or the continuing separation from my children create anxieties that also seem to make the neuropathic discomfort and pain kick in, any sort of stress is a factor worrying about my renal cancer what the next scan will show and in general normal stress and strains seem to make it worse.

  I do think the estrangement from my sons is a factor not seeing my grand children has been painful. The issues are not resolved and may never be resolved. We are a stubborn bunch. Estrangement from my spouse is also a factor though not always an everyday thing it has been a source of woe for us both. Care-taking a person with cancer and other maladies is very hard work and sometimes we get tangled up in our differences of perception and experience. And the results are often alienation and exhaustion trying to put things together again. 

 Right now I feel as if I am misunderstood and alone more than I might wish to be. On the other hand I do like being alone and having time to focus on my own thoughts and my art. But it is very hard to work on things when you often feel that your art is and has been a source of misunderstanding and suffering in your life from the earliest times one can remember. I suppose things will be sorted out posthumously. Soren Kierkegaard famously wrote that life was better understood backwards. Most of my life is behind me and the future is a short while in comparison. I am exhausted by my desire to set things straight to get the sort of sensitive interpretation that I think befits a person who has devoted their life to creative pursuits. But this may just be a normal feeling about the desire to be understood and appreciated outside the framework of autobiography of a history distorted by a culture more obsessed with back stories rather than the fruit of one’s aesthetic experiences. All I know is I have pain and stress makes it worse and this time of my life has been very painful and perplexing.

  I am not a mean person but I am very frank and critical at times. Indeed I do feel that my life has been more difficult because of my bluntness my critical perspective is very honest in a world where flattery is the most common form of communication. Whatever the truth maybe lies beyond my power to know. It’s not easy to have an organic brain disorder that is triggered by stress and psychological pain. I may survive myself but it is not always easy for the people I love and care about as I don’t enjoy conflict. And I do want to be understood but I fear my language of words and images does more to confuse people than enlighten them. I have always loved music and art. I have often felt I suffered because I never mastered math and plain talk. My ambitions my desire always has resided in a past and future rather than in the present moment the present flies by with such speed it is as if we don’t understand much in the midst of living and that our experience is quite retrospective.

i have found that writing myself has some odd benefit when I read it later under different circumstances. Maybe a blog is not the best place to write but my notes and my notebooks are often so scrambled they take me years to unravel. This maybe because I see images colors and references to be a whole different language where just text makes me try to make sense of my feelings. Because life does seem like a passage a sort of trip through time and my dreams my sleep have never been satisfactory, at my age sleeping is difficult and broken. But I am okay I just wish I did not cause so much dust to fly. Like T.S. Eliot I do not like to disturb the dust on the roses. But I do wake people up and sometimes that is the worst thing one can do.