Category Archives: personal

Explorations Change In Emphasis

Alumen Roccae - Stephen Calhoun

Alumen Rocca (2017) Stephen Calhoun

Over the next months, leading into 2018, I am going to shift my blogging emphasis toward using the Explorations Blog to bookmark compelling content across the range of my interests without also including a great deal of personal commentary. This blog will fold in the old music studio blog’s content, nogutsnoglorystudios. This will also afford me the chance to include new music oriented content. Finally, after over a decade of musings about my personal wandering and its shifting contexts, this new direction will dial those kinds of essays back.

These changes are all due to the sudden manifestation in my life’s mission of its missing expressive aspect, my original experiments in creating mirror symmetry-based numinous images. One result of this new chapter is that the blog will softly arc away from its prior principal (and multiple concerns,) and cast a new arc toward the cultural cosmos.

In the background, my interests also have been lightly altered, yet, core concerns remain grounded and just what these have been for decades. As always, juxtaposition will be deployed for the sake of ‘hiding’ my own sense.

“I live in an unethical society, that coarsens the sensibilities and thwarts the capacities for goodness of most people but makes available for minority consumption an astonishing array of intellectual and aesthetic pleasures. Those who don’t enjoy (in both senses) my pleasures have every right, from their side, to regard my consciousness as spoiled, corrupt, decadent.” Susan Sontag

Leave a Comment

Filed under blogging, personal

Food For Another – some poems of Tim Calhoun

Caged Bird (2014) Stephen Calhoun 7x5"

Caged Bird (2014) Stephen Calhoun 7×5″

Tim Calhoun Science

Red was my brother's favorite color.

Red was my brother’s favorite color.

I was reminded recently in rereading some of his poems from his self-curated unpublished collection The Hero In the Oak Branch Stretcher, that in passing away in February 1993, he was a poet of the pre-internet era. This poem, Expulsion, is prescient about contemporary communication.

Expulsion Tim Calhoun

via CWRU.edu POETSBANK is a loosely structured organization that sponsors and promotes readings by and of Cleveland poets. It was the brainchild of poet Daniel Thompson, who began sponsoring readings at the County Justice Ctr. in the late 1970s to commemorate the birthdays of Cleveland poets HART CRANE, LANGSTON HUGHES, and d.a. levy (see DARRYL ALLEN LEVY). It tended to attract performance-oriented poets as opposed to more publication-minded groups, such as the Poets’ League of Gtr. Cleveland. Since his girlfriend’s father was a bank president, Thompson chose the name Poetsbank in order that he might become one himself. In the absence of elections, he has filled that office since the group’s founding. The principal function of Poetsbank has been to provide a name whenever a sponsor was needed for a reading. It attempted to include artists from different disciplines, to promote woman poets, and to address such political issues as nuclear disarmament and homelessness. Its most memorable events were the annual “Junkstock” readings given at the Pearl Rd. Auto Wrecking & Salvage Co. during the 1980s. Other readings have taken place in such venues as the ARCADE, the Cleveland Workhouse, the county jail, the FLATS, and area coffeehouses. Participating poets, besides Thompson, have included Barbara Angell, Kristen Ban Tepper, TIM CALHOUN, Mark Hopkins, Tim Joyce, JAMES KILGORE, Marilyn Murray, Maarafu Ojo, Geoffrey Singer, C. A. Smith, Amy Sparks, Zena Zipporah, and Barry Zucker.

Tim Calhoun Flame

Fraternality - 2014 - Stephen Calhoun

Fraternality – 2014 – Stephen Calhoun

A lot of posts have touched upon my deceased twin brother Tim Calhoun, 1954-1993.

First-year M.A. student Blaire Grassel has won the 2017 Timothy Calhoun Memorial Prize for Poetry.
The Timothy Calhoun Memorial Prize for Poetry recognizes the best poem or group of poems (3) by a graduate student in the Department of English.

Leave a Comment

Filed under personal, poetry, visual experiments, my art

#MeToo #notMe, Yes, of course me

metoo-png-Milano

Definition of Sexual Harassment via NotSurprised.org

‘We Are Not Surprised’: Read the Blistering Open Letter That Art-World Women Wrote About Artforum
The list of signatories is growing by the hour. artnet News, October 30, 2017

It seems to me consistent with the old fashioned archetypal view of hidden complexes and incumbent courses of social action and social response that the election of President Priapic would promote an intense and heartfelt compensation. This has begun to transform relations in the patriarchical social structures.

(Also, archetypically related to this are the sweep of the athletes protest against state violence against minorities and #blacklivesmatter.)

Personally, the questions for me are what might I experience, act, and, communicate differently? As soon as this had bubbled up, I spent an afternoon with my artistic collaborator Kathy to discuss our first creative collaboration. She took me to school not on sexual behavior or harassment but on entering and being present and self-aware in the sacred space of her studio. This is precisely where my attitude needs the most adjustment. For many men this is where the transformation could begin. For others the call beckons in a more fundamental direction.

Leave a Comment

Filed under current events, personal, sociology

Generativitality

Some Thoughts On Generative Art by Anders Holt

Brisk Totem - 2015 - Stephen Calhoun

Brisk Totem – 2015 – Stephen Calhoun

Many who know something about my art practice know I loathe the terms “digital art” and “digital artist.” Both terms strike me as almost always leading right into various thickets of ignorance, bias, oversimplification, and, confusion about what the word “digital” means when applied to art-making. Yes, it is my personal hangup that I don’t want to be associated with inevitable misconceptions about where ‘the digits’ fall in my own process.

On the other hand I dig being someone who creates generative art because I’m always ready to explain how I deploy scripted generative routines to make images. If I encounter someone who knows about generative art processes, one of their first questions will be along the lines of, “what sequences what?”

An art acquaintance asked me on what kind of art I made. My initial response was about processes and processing, ‘After taking pictures of set-ups I cut them into symmetries, and, process these half pieces into full symmetries. I may process the art work further by adjusting pixels using software.’

“Mixed process photographs.”

“Why didn’t you just say so?”

I term the art work to be a: mixed process photographic image, or, mixed process photo-generative image. Sometimes the finished piece is a straight photograph–taken by a digital camera–cut and pasted into a mirror symmetry. It’s all about the process and the ‘processes of processes.’ This fact is, apparently, very hard to approach from the direction of ‘the digital.’

When I imagine possibilities in the realm of generativity, I am visualizing how different iterations of the processing of processes and first order processing work in concert. In this there are features of a peculiar cybernetics anchored to imagining.

Over the past two winters I have not been firing up the generative dashboard, yet I have been stockpiling various experiments, in my head. My goal would be to create a piece as overwhelming as the two here, Brisk Totem, and, Sonny Sharrock in Heaven, both 2015.

Sonny Sharrock In Heaven - 2015 - Stephen Calhoun artist

Sonny Sharrock In Heaven – 2015 – Stephen Calhoun

Leave a Comment

Filed under art, artists, my research, personal, visual experiments, my art

Once a Hawk

Hawken School Class of 1972 Reunion

library, Upper School, Hawken School

This past weekend I went to my forty-fifth high school reunion, for the Class of ’72. I have been to every single five year Class of ’72 Hawken School (Gates Mills, Ohio,) reunion. The first one was in 1977. I was living in Middlebury Vermont at the time.

This year the hallowed men’s circle that uniquely characterizes the class’s fraternal ritual was at an Upper School (grades 9-12) transformed by a luxurious new 21st century series of connected school buildings. As you can see, some of us took the tour. Almost nothing of our own experience ‘back in the day’ naturally translates to the new surroundings; and, I note as much while also regarding the addition of women to the upper school classes starting in 1974. The buck buck tree is still there. Several of the old building’s wings, with their fifties utilitarian cinder blocks, have remained connected to the new campus.

Each reunion presents a mini seminar in men, masculinity, adult development, families, and, the second law of thermodynamics. It’s a lovely group.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, there is no other life but this. (Henry David Thoreau)

Leave a Comment

Filed under adult learning, Cleveland, friends, personal, self-knowledge

Happy Birthday Thelonious Monk

I first heard Thelonious Monk in 1970, several years before I put my jazz head on. Probably it was my classmate Warren who auditioned an LP track. I don’t recall which one. I didn’t care for it. However, in the winter of 1971 I began working part time in a record store next to the post office in Cleveland Heights. In Budget records and Tapes’s collection of vinyl promos were two Monk records, Monk’s Blues, the big band record arranged by Oliver Nelson, and, Criss Cross, a quartet record from the sixties with tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse. The former record was one of the owner’s favorite records. At the time the available discography of the master was quite slim with the exception of the Columbia recordings, all of which dated from the sixties beginning in 1963.

“To be nobody but yourself in a world that night and day wants to make you like everybody else is to fight the greatest battle you will fight and never stop fighting.” – E. E. Cummings

The iconic Cleveland jazz maven Harvey Pekar scoffed at the big band record one day while in the store, and lamented the unavailability of the “class Blue Note sides.” But, never mind, Harvey, despite your influence on my tastes and your insistence on the store bringing in the Black Lion trio dates recorded in 1971 and released in 1972, it would not be until those Blue Notes were issued in a stirling twofer in 1976 that I got bitten by the Monk hard.

How hard? ‘Life-changingly hard.’ Monk is second to no one in my estimation and surely in my experience. Happy 100th birthday to the khidr of sound, Thelonious Sphere Monk.

Leave a Comment

Filed under creative captures, music, personal

Today’s Destiny, and May It be Happy, Abdullah Ibrahim

My friend Abdullah Ibrahim turned 83 today. Of the many possibilities for experiential learning he served my way in the late eighties, the most essential was that the next breath possibly might turn out to be the last such breath.

Abdullah Ibrahim from Ian Henderson on Vimeo.

A man in prison is sent a prayer rug by his friend. What he had wanted, of course, was a file or a crowbar or a key! But he began using the rug, doing five-times prayer before dawn, at noon, mid-afternoon, after sunset, and before sleep. Bowing, sitting up, bowing again, he notices an odd pattern in the weave of the rug, just at the qibla, the point, where his head touches. He studies and meditates on that pattern, gradually discovering that it is a diagram of the lock that confines him in his cell and how it works. He’s able to escape. Anything you do every day can open into the deepest spiritual place, which is freedom.
— Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi

800px-Abdullah_Ibrahim

Abdullah refashioned a teaching story and transmitted the best version. I’ve revised it a bit due to some additional understanding gained over the intervening years.

A hunter was in the jungle hunting when he heard in the distance a beautiful bird song. He slowly and quietly made his way to the song’s source. Standing in the brush near a tall tree he spotted a gorgeous bird singing a song the hunter was the most beautiful melody he’s ever heard a bird sing. He set a snare, and the next day came back and found the bird trapped. With a great deal of respect and care he brought the bird back with him to his country place.

The hunter outfitted a large cage and hung the cage with the bird in it in a sunlit corner with windows on both sides. The bird was quiet for many weeks after first being housed in the cage. However, eventually, the bird began piecing together bits of melodies. After beginning to do this, a few weeks later, the bird began singing the songs that had so captured the hunter’s attention in the jungle.

Yet, the songs seemed much sadder to the hunter than the original melodies. He reflected on this and decided the bird was lonely. So it was the hunter decided to return to the jungle and track down a bird like the bird in the cage, and bring it back as a companion.

The hunter returned to the same location in the jungle where he had first heard the marvelous bird songs. Not right away, but soon enough, the hunter one morning heard a similar song. He tracked the melody to another tall tree. From some nearby bushes he stood quietly observing the singing bird on a branch high up the tree. Then something shattering happened, mid song the bird fell out of the tree and landed with a soft thud in the undergrowth.

The hunter was shocked and dismayed as he made his way to the now still and silent bird. He gently picked it up. It was dead. The hunter was so moved and so deeply startled by this that, after burying the bird, he abandoned his search.

He returned to his farm. Walking into the room where the caged bird was singing, he sat on the shoulder of a couch next to the cage. To himself, the hunter recounted what had happened in the jungle. When he finished, the bird stopped singing. Then it fell off its perch to the floor of the cage. The hunter was instantly beside himself. He opened the door of the cage and picked up the still bird.

Then, as he was about to pronounce the bird dead, the bird instantly fluttered a second and then flew out of his hand and flew out an open window, and flew to a branch on a nearby tree, and, started singing a fresh and glorious song.

(The title of this story is: Thanks for the Message!)

Dr. Ibrahim and me, 1989, Middlebury Vermont

Dr. Ibrahim and me, 1989, Middlebury Vermont

Speaking of my current chapter as an artist, Abdullah Ibrahim’s influence on my creative mission is certain and very direct. Yes, for me, my art is about providing an opportunity for a small moment of positive feeling. I also have redeployed many times his self-evaluative question: What are your four highest art forms that you practice?

FB-Yayiqandusela-16x16-Stephen-Calhoun(2016)

At 83, Abdullah Ibrahim, the ‘africanizer of Ellington,’ remains one of the masters of contemporary and ancient music. The tour video above from a few weeks ago speaks for itself. Ibrahim lives today with his honey in Switzerland.

Leave a Comment

Filed under personal

Slowly My Timing Improves

My own result hit close to the sweet spot. My self-evaluation about my time perspective recognizes that my hedonistic present anchors me and is also the imposition I have to work against. This is consistent with my Myers-Briggs XNXP, my Jungian puer aeternus complex, and my Big five extroverted, open to experience, and, non-neurotic personality type.

Calhoun-time-perspective

Take the survey:
Take the Time Perspective Inventory

Importance of having a balanced time-perspective profile

Zimbardo & Boyd show that each of the six perspectives may have benefits, some much more than others. They also show that the costs associated with any one perspective may rise sharply if it is held in excess, and/or if it is out of balance with others of the six. Many of the book’s examples involve disturbed persons (e.g., addicts). But it also offers valuable more-general observations too. Here’s one that caught my eye: In discussing the faults of some executives who’d been running risky mortgage businesses not long ago, the authors find that “lack of balance between present and future orientations in both business and government is a well-worn path to disaster.”

As a result, Zimbardo & Boyd urge their readers to develop an “optimally balanced time perspective”:
“The ideal we want you to develop is a balanced time perspective in place of a narrowly focused single time zone. A balanced time perspective will allow you to flexibly shift from past to present to future in response to the demands of the situation facing you so that you can make optimal decisions.” twotheories blog

Leave a Comment

Filed under adult learning, personal, psychology, science, self-knowledge

DIY Eclipse

[KGVID]http://squareone-learning.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Two_Eclipses.mp4[/KGVID]

soundtrack:

The coniunctio happens in the underworld, it happens in the dark when there is no light shining any more. When you are completely out and consciousness is gone, then something is born or generated; in the deepest depression, in the deepest desolation, the new personality is born. When you are at the end of your tether, that is the moment when the coniunctio, the coincidence of opposites, takes place (Mary-Louise von Franz).

Leave a Comment

Filed under analytic(al) psychology, personal, visual story

Gratuitous Surfing Videos for Summer 2017

The Dock from STAB on Vimeo.

The Dock

INTO BLISS – Jordan Rodin from David & Douglas on Vimeo.

Into Bliss

Culture Shifters: Jake Burghart (Director of Photography @ Vice) from Mike Pagan on Vimeo.

VICE’s Jake Burghart

(I learned to surf in Hawaii during the summer of 1968. I did so on a Hobie with a mahogany stringer, and, then graduated to my cousin’s new Greg Noll red fiberglass long board. It was all long boards back in the day. The last time I surfed was on a vacation trip to Hilton Head in 1970.)

Leave a Comment

Filed under personal

Vanishment in the Garden

The Shark In The Park from Polynoid on Vimeo.

Raspberries and blackberries have won the day in the berry garden out back. They have come to dominate the strawberry patch in the rectangle set in an unfavorable place right by a large buckeye tree.

This is similar to how my creativity has become reoriented to visual experiments rather than sonic experiments. Sometimes when I walk past the two pedal steels in my current digital image processing studio, I strum the strings.

Leave a Comment

Filed under personal, visual experiments, my art

Synchronicity and Wheels

Monday, February 13, I was driving to Wadsworth, listening to a CD, thinking about my livelihood as an artist–such as it is–and a tune started up from my single most favored rock record of all time, The Gilded Palace of Sin, by The Flying Burrito Brothers.

The song was Wheels.

We’ve all got wheels to take ourselves away
We’ve got the telephones to say what we can’t say
We all got higher and higher every day
Come on wheels take this boy away
We’re not afraid to ride
We’re not afraid to die come on wheels take me home today
So come on wheels take this boy away

And when I feel my time is almost up
And destiny is in my right hand
I’ll turn to him who made my faith so strong
Come on wheels make this boy a man
We’re not afraid to ride
We’re not afraid to die come on wheels take me home today
So come on wheels take this boy away
Come on wheels take this boy away

The record was released February 11, 1969. I would hear it for the first time at the Amazing Dynamo Man’s house, draped over his bed, in September 1970. He, Jamie Cohen, and I, had just met, just begun tenth grade as first year sophomores at Hawken School in Cleveland. We fell into each other like rain drops into the ocean.

Me, Hoon, atop the Amazing Dynamo Man

Me, Hoon, atop the Amazing Dynamo Man, 1972

Forty eight years later, I’m reflecting on art matters having to do with commerce, Wheels comes on, I glance out my car’s driver-side window, and see a flatbed truck passing me on I71.

It’s badged with this logo:

arts-way3col

I chuckle, then laugh heartily. The moment was not just a gilded moment of synchronicity, it was a text book synchronicity!

Shit.

“We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the wheel depends. We turn clay to make a vessel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the vessel depends. We pierce doors and windows to make a house; And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the utility of the house depends. Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the utility of what is not.” ? C.G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle

Kabir's Sobriety #2(16x16base)

Kabir’s Sobriety 2016 Stephen Calhoun

A synchronicity worthy of the term is required to be deeply disturbing, or deeply disruptive, or deeply derailing. What I have to offer are my happy delusions! I’ve been revisiting Kabir. #326 of his Bijak:

No customers for the word:
the price is high.
Without paying you can’t get it,
so move on by.

In January I had a very simple dream–simple as far as its arc.

(1) I’m on the side porch of a gothic church. It’s a fall day, and the church’s porch is the scene of a rummage sale. I’m picking little costume jewelry pieces up and putting each one back down. I notice some nice oak chairs and old brass floor lamps. I say to the lady, “You have some nice stuff.” She answers back, “I see you’re not in a buying mood, but the prices are right.”

(2) Walking down the steps, with the front of the church rising to my right, I cross a lawn and walk toward an old Chevy station wagon. I walk to the driver’s side and their is a man with a hat, and his wife is to his right, and his son and daughter are in the back seat. The rear has suitcases. I think to myself, ‘It’s an all American family.’ The man asks if I will help him get unstuck. I put my shoulder to the frame of his window to push, and, without much effort I push and feel his car rise a bit and become unstuck.

(3) The car gathers speed and then veers slightly across the front lawn of the church. It crashes into the wall of the sanctuary. I run toward it, but am halted when I see a bloodied brown panther or mountain lion, seemingly crushed between the grill and limestone wall, pull itself out of its predicament and jump over the hood. It stands on the grass and shakes its head once vertically, runs off.

Yes.

The-Guilded-Palace-of-Sin

My favorite track from my favorite record.

Leave a Comment

Filed under adult learning, experiential learning, music, personal, psychology, self-knowledge, serendipity

Working Away From the Center


Family Synergy Mandala(Stephen Calhoun)

Virgins with T-squares
and compasses, guarding
the heavenly blackboards.

And the angel of numbers
reflective, flying
from the 1 to the 2, from the 2
to the 3, from 3 to the 4.

Dead chalk and sponges
rule and erase
the light of the heavens.

Not the sun, moon or stars,
not the sudden green flash
of the lines and the lightning,
nor the air. Only haze.

Virgins without T-squares,
without compasses, weeping.

And on the dead blackboards,
the angel of numbers,
lifeless, laid out
on the 1 and the 2
on the 3, and the 4…

(The Angel of Numbers, Rafael Alberti, translated by Jerome Rothenberg)

The First Snow, Ever(Stephen Calhoun)

Only gradually did I discover what the mandala really is: Formation, Transformation, Eternal Mind’s eternal recreation. And that is the self, the wholeness of the personality, which if all goes well is harmonious, but which cannot tolerate self-deceptions. (Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections)

FB-Quiet-Window-Mandala-Film

So you see, in a moment during a patient’s treatment when there is a great disorder and chaos in a man’s mind, the symbol can appear, as in the form of a mandala in a dream, or when he makes imaginary and fantastical drawings, or something of the sort. (Carl Jung)

TW-Loosening-Mandla-I-Stephen-Calhoun

A mandala spontaneously appears as a compensatory archetype during times of disorder. (Carl Jung) [h/t carljungdepthpsychology.wordpress.com]

There are four notes, (suppose these to be notes-to-self,) that come all the way up and to the center when I reflect on why it is that the mandala has taken over my creative practice.

These are simple notes too, and these represent the starkest capture.

(1) Depressed at the rise of Trump and nihilist Trumpism.

(2) Demoralized at the failure to satisfactorily meet my worldly obligations.

(3) Understand the inner order reflected in the enthusiasm for manifesting mandalas is only a potential reordering, and the proof of this is in the outer disorder.

(4) Unhappy and tired in the wake of the sharp arrivals due to the constant processes of death and loss that have struck over the past years.

I wear my depression very lightly. Optimistic. Youthful outlook.

My contemplative practice is the first balancing act. I note my creative agency is powerful too, yet, I haven’t a clue as to what is going on, except to distrust to a niggling degree that I am on the right track. I have to suppose this distrust of my own creativity is something to work through at this rather early yet auspicious juncture. This has nothing to do with my personal qualification of my creative product, it has to do with what this feels like in the context of outer disorder. It comes as no surprise that powerful inner motives are working me over a bit at the expense of outer order.

There is in this a fraught paradox: betwixt the rush and rushing forward of inspiration and ideas, and, the yet to be shaped command to, in actuality, set this aside for the purpose of getting the house in order.

FB-Mandala-Five-One-Fifty---ExLg-Urban-install-(Stephen-Calhoun)

The energetic aspect is clear enough to me. After all, I am not painting mandalas or setting fine grains of sand to a blueprint. Once the mathematics clicked for me, the opportunity presented itself fully: there are all sorts of archival photographs which may lend themselves to manipulation. These photos now come up again to be resuscitated.

(One image in this post presents how this is done.)

Still, am I creating mandalas? What is coming up and out seem to me reductions too, and also pieces symbolize eyes and sphincters. The images that consist of patterns of concentric circles nevertheless are unitary objects. Also, the direction of experimentation already is disrupting the simple concentricity.

Severity Mandala

Yes, creating mandalas is soothing. It occurs to me also that this is of a piece with my artistic mission, and, this also puts in 2nd order cybernetic relations a deeper aspect of the kitschy facile gimmicks I am employing as propositions in various visual experiments. Those relations are about learning.

As for my own psyche, I’m waiting for the dream. The only dream that recently arrived was optimistic, and this seemed to me its fault.

A magical, sacred, and perfected environment of the Buddha, which
denotes the order and harmony of an enlightened mind, and built on their
perfect wisdom. The purified circle of an enlightened being, an environment
wherein the endless compassion of the enlightened one is expressed.”
(C.G. Jung: ‘Mandala Symbolism’)

Oh, there’s this–see its opening and conclusion:

Theoretical Foundation for Jung’s “Mandala Symbolism”
Based on Discrete Chaotic Dynamics of Interacting Neurons
Vladimir Gontar (International Group for Chaos Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel)

Leave a Comment

Filed under analytic(al) psychology, art, artists, experiential learning, personal, psychology, self-knowledge, visual experiments, my art

Unities

Mind-Reading Cartoon

One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do
Two can be as bad as one
It’s the loneliest number since the number one

No is the saddest experience you’ll ever know
Yes, it’s the saddest experience you’ll ever know

‘Cause one is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do
One is the loneliest number, whoa-oh, worse than two

It’s just no good anymore since you went away
Now I spend my time just making rhymes of yesterday

One is the loneliest number
One is the loneliest number
One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do

One is the loneliest
One is the loneliest
One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do

It’s just no good anymore since you went away

(Number)
One is the loneliest (number)
One is the loneliest (number)
One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do

Nillson/Edwards

Stephen Calhoun artist

I’ve been making mandalas. This represents a regression in both the terms of psyche, and, my own growing artistry. This is a local reconfiguration for the sake of doing different experiments concerned with the singularity given by the whole “O,” the eye, the core, the centrifugal oneness. Empirically, mandalas don’t grip the viewer for the same reasons a complex work chock full of partially hidden patterns and relations grip someone. Yet, as the dictionary tells us, mandala means magical circle.

http://artiststephencalhoun.com/image-sets-and-series/mandalas/

Yet, everybody at times enjoys partaking of some regression! Going backward sometimes means moving back in time toward innocence, or moving to a previous point at which point the bad mojo had not arrived, or been elected.

Mandalas are the warm blanket of the world of created manmade forms.
My mandalas…

Read more: Three Dog Night – One (is The Loneliest Number) Lyrics | MetroLyrics

Leave a Comment

Filed under adult learning, analytic(al) psychology, art, artists, experiential learning, personal, philosophy

Desse and Kate

Judith Buerkel, great friend, squareONE partner

Judith Buerkel, great friend, squareONE partner

I agree that the heart of creativity is self-expression. Following one’s own soul, so to speak. Perhaps that is only half of the picture; for creativity to provide the self with substance, it must, in some way, be reciprocal. By this I mean that there needs to be some way of gaining feedback, response from others, interaction. If not, it seems to me that the creative urge has no object, only endless input into a void. (Judith Buerkel, email to Walter Logeman’s Psyber-L email listserv, 1997)

Stephen calhoun, artist

Desse’s Dream II (2016) Stephen Calhoun

As only people who know me well, well know, I am an advocate on behalf of the value of friendship, close relationships, and, collaborative exploring. Starting late, I grew into myself, and next into the small number of relationships, that were, are, able to vigorously support these ambitious interpersonal objectives. I have written at length on this blog about this endeavor, the one bit of writing here that is essential if the stranger wants to begin to get a grip on what my soul the most.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. I am not a ‘holiday person,’ yet, this year, as a matter of this brutal year, 2016, I am thankful that there are several persons who have embraced the call wholeheartedly to be my close friend. I suppose everybody in this tiny group knows who they are, with my wife Susan, my closest pal, exemplifying the total dedication that literally is grace.

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers’ love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refined,
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

Last month I walked in the back door of our house and, like I do many times, I spied the mix media piece made by my friend, mentor, associate, co-explorer, Judith Buerkel. She passed away in 2007. In the aftermath of Judith’s leave-taking at the end of a grueling illness, I retrieved Judith small art piece with the help of Holly. I met both Judith and Holly in 1995. Holly remains one of my very closest friends, or, as I am want to structure, Holly is in the innermost devotional circle. In a way, Judith tied Holly and me together.

This piece I spied has a place of honor in the back hallway gallery, a corridor hung with my own, older, art works. On the day I spied the piece–yet, again–I had an idea, that I could use the piece as part of the subject matter, or scene, of a photograph! Even though for a long time I had understood that Judith’s superior artistic eye had fashioned this fine piece out of some of the similar materials, sticks, and dried leaves, which draw my own eye, it never struck me that I might collaborate with her, nine years after she slipped away from the mortal coil.

I made six pieces in two series, Desse’s Desire, Desse’s Dream.

Kate Kuper(image used without permission via Univ. of Illinois, Champaign)

Kate Kuper (image used without permission via Univ. of Illinois, Champaign)

Over the last twenty years, it has been much more likely that my very closest friends have been women. As another friend, the late Ken Warren, would speak of this,

Your anima problem provides enticing tastes of integration.

The first enticing taste, then, came about in seventh and eighth grade, 1966-1968, at Roxboro Junior High, the place where I fell in with a clique of schoolmates, of which three gals came to be among the first close friends I ever had. Kate Kuper was one of the trio, and by the time I graduated from high school in 1972, I counter her as my closest gal friend.

We lost touch after I moved away to Vermont in 1974. But, incredibly, when I came back to our hometown in 1992, my mom reminded me that her parents, Ginger and Al (or Buzz,) played tennis, and that I should look them up. Doing so, I reconnected, and, soon after reconnected with Kate. we caught up by phone, and, enjoyed catching up on several of her visits to Cleveland Heights, and, continued to catch each other up one or two times a year. Kate counts as the longest running relationship I’ve sustained; it marked its fiftieth year this year.

We knew each other’s basic nature fairly well, and, our adult friendship was full of honest exchanges and unconditional acceptance. Kate passed on November 17, a shock to my system I learned about from her older sister a few days after that leave-taking.

About Kate I will tell you several things: she was very brilliant, very self-possessed, very self-effacing, and, very self-critical. She burned brightly, and, her intense drive set her apart from my own hippie boy laid-back, happy-go-luckyness. We both knew that our differences helped our friendly intimacy be dynamic and helped support our friendship over decades.

She told me after her father Al fell ill,

I’m sure glad you came back to Cleveland.

What is my debt to my close friends, and all the great ladies? Immense.

Leave a Comment

Filed under personal

Hope and Walking

Vicki and Barb

Vicki and Barb

I haven’t been able to devote anywhere near as much time to volunteering to help elect Hillary Rodham Clinton to be the first woman President of the United States of America. Yet, today is finally the day where the people will make their choice.

I feel confident but know the election is going to be close, because our country is not only polarized, its two polar tribes are close to one another in size.

It has been enjoyable to return to the GOTV staging house in South Euclid and hang out and watch the ladies and the feminine spirit in action. Hat tip to the one million volunteers, to Lucy and Carol and the Shaker Square team, and, over the last several days to Janet, Sherry, Vicki and Barb.

I hope Trump gets squished like a bug!

Leave a Comment

Filed under current events, personal

Poetry Of the Tear

KW

Kenneth Warren (1953-2015)

To be in different states without a change
is not a possibility (Charles Olson)

I visited, with Dan Slife, the Saturday 9/3 event in Buffalo, A Celebration of Ken Warren. It was held in The Poetry Collection of the University of Buffalo, at Lockwood Library. The brutalist University architecture led to an initial ‘esoteric’ moment, as we tried to find the The Poetry Collection, and the room given over for an afternoon to the legacy of the great esotericist/American poetics/guardian of the punk hole/and master of the House Organ.

You see once in the Lockwood Library, the friendly fellow at the service desk had no idea where The Poetry center was located. We found a flyer and saw it was in Capen Hall, but we understood that Lockwood Library itself occupies Capen Hall. Luckily, for a moment, we noted it was in room 420, so we hopped into the elevator and took it to the fourth floor. No room 420.

We returned to the ground. A co-ed had stopped at the bottom of the stairs and we confessed our minor desperation and asked her if she knew where The Poetry Center was, or was room 420 in the very building this exchange was taking place within.

I have no clue about the poetry stuff, but room 420 is probably accessible by either the front elevator or the elevators down the corridor that reach another section of the fourth floor.

Dan and I gave each other a look. Sure enough the second set of elevators reached a corridor on the fourth floor that was inaccessible by way of the elevators facing the front doors.

Ken Celebration (1)

Cube O’ Olson

A probe generated by Stephen Calhoun April 13, 2014. I did two random rolls in series. This was submitted to House Organ in April 2015, six weeks before Ken Warren suddenly died of a heart attack.

Learning Intention:

Tell Charles Olson Something He Needed to know, But, Alas It Is Too late

submission to House Organ April 15, 2015 - unpublished

submission to House Organ April 15, 2015 – unpublished

Steve Lewandowski wondered if I would like to get in line and speak to Ken’s memory. As it happened I went last. In this very good spot I spoke a little bit of how Ken’s interests and my own overlapped, told a Sufi teaching story, and reminded everyone that Ken’s sincere interest in how you are doing often first met a fresh report with the temporary observation,

You’re fucked.

Parker and Beckett spoke, a high point, Dan played a song, and a long line up of poets and literary types brought some A Game to the afternoon’s delightful, and bittersweet proceedings.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Kenneth Warren, personal, poetry

Roger’s Blues

Without wishing it, we human beings are placed in situations in which the great principles entangle us in something, and God leaves it to us to find a way out. C.G. Jung (Good and Evil In Analytical Psychology, Civilization In Transition)

My neighbor Roger Talbott recently retired from his post as a Methodist minister. I’m following his new blog Fear Not Online. At the moment he understands it will be concerned with the second half of life.

Leave a Comment

Filed under adult learning, personal, self-knowledge

Artist Stephen Calhoun

artiststephencalhoun

My new web site features my art, art based in symmetries and surprise. It’s live today!

ARTISTSTEPHENCALHOUN.COM

I’ll be highlighting some of its features over the next few days and on twitter.

Leave a Comment

Filed under art, artists, personal, visual experiments, my art, web 2.0+

Artist’s Statement, Part II. & III.

Hat Thangka II (Stephen Calhoun 2016)

Hat Thangka II (Stephen Calhoun 2016)

Secondary and Tertiary Contexts and Multiplicities

ARTIST’S STATEMENT (middle section)

II.

I came to this as a matter of my lifelong drive to satisfy my curiosity. This mission demands that I wander, experience, explore, do experiments.

III.

To steep ourselves in a subject-matter we have first to plunge into it.— John Dewey

If you have not experienced a thing, it is not true!— Kabir

The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it. Art is the transforming experience.
— Joseph Campbell

Follow the perfume, not the tracks.— Shams of Tabriz

Commentary: My art isn’t post-modern. This doesn’t mean that a post-modern trip is impossible. All trips may be possible. From my personal outlook, there is a cybernetic reaction possible and so I’m doing the only thing I know how to do. What gets read into this counter-normativity my work supposes? Whatever it is, it is tertiary. It would interest me. There are some bridges which could be fashioned. These would join the secondary to the tertiary!

What’s the best explanation of what you are seeing? This is a very hard question.

I’m working a cybernetic formula too. It has three constituents. It would shock and delight me were anyone to figure this formula out from the reflection on experience, or, (easier,) from the background.

Leave a Comment

Filed under art, artists, personal