Alter-Ego Mandala: Dreaming Of The Albatross – 8/52 (Gogyohka), 8/52, BlackBerry 52 – WEEK 8, February 27th 2011, scan © 2011 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
Medium: Drawn by hand with a black Ultra Fine Point Sharpie & Sharpie Peel-Off China Marker on Canson Mix Media XL Series 98lb drawing paper. Colored with Faber Castell 6 PITT Artist Brush Pens, DecoColor Glossy Oil Base Paint Markers, Portfolio Water Soluble Oil Pastels, Caran D’Ache NeoColor II Water Soluble Wax Crayons, Sharpie Medium Point Oil-Based Opaque Paint Markers.
A second self, a trusted friend. Or a dark half that emerges when we least expect it — in art, writing, and poetry. When I viewed Never (Found Poem) from Lotus, inspired by Charles Bukowski’s work The Continual Condition, these were the lines that resonated for me:
Our problem is
that we divorce ourselves
from ourselves
howling
and scratching their bellies,
and dreaming of the albatross.
I looked in the mirror. I started drawing. An outline emerged, a person I vaguely recognized. The longer I drew, the more familiar the image, the less it looked like me. An alter-ego. I went to the studio, pulled out the Royal typewriter Liz bought for me at a garage sale (turns out, it’s French), and while Jimi Hendrix’s Rainbow Bridge played on the stereo turntable, wrote a gogyohka:
Rock, Paper, Scissors – 8/52 (Gogyohka), 8/52, BlackBerry 52 – WEEK 8, February 27th 2011, scan © 2011 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
Medium: typed on Crane paper stock with vintage Royal typewriter. Scanned as TIF, saved as JPEG.
I’ve long been a fan of Charles Bukowski’s work. He was the kind of poet that didn’t pull any punches. He was born in 1920 in Andernach, Germany, lived hard, knew how he would die, wrote about the veneer that crumbles over the steely hardness. He wrote to the end, died of leukemia on March 9th, 1994 and is buried at Green Hills Memorial Park in Rancho Palos Verdes, near his home in San Pedro, California.
It is the honesty in his work I am drawn to. After I read Never (Found Poem), I saw that a reader had left a link to all things Bukowski. I was surprised to find a whole page of his artwork, dotted with self-portraits. Bukowski’s portrait paintings and Never (Found Poem) from Lotus sparked the mandala. The quote stoked the fire:
The difference between life and art is art is more bearable.
— Charles Bukowski
-posted on red Ravine, Saturday, March 5th, 2011
-related to posts: Best Of BlackBerry 365 — First Quarter SlideShow, BlackBerry 365 Project — White Winter Squirrel, Flying Solo — Dragonfly In Yellow Rain, Searching For Stillness, icicle tumbleweed (haiga) — 2/52, The Mirado Black Warrior, Waning Moon (Haiga), The Void — January Mandalas, ybonesy’s self portrait (part of her Farewell To red Ravine)
Lotus and I will continue our call and response by posting a BlackBerry photo for the 52 weeks of 2011. Feel free to join us if you wish (learn about the project’s beginnings at BlackBerry 52 Collaboration).
Ummm….Quoin….don’t take this the wrong way, but your alter-ego looks like Wolfman Jack. Are you a radio DJ?
One of my favorite poems is a Bukowski. I don’t think it has a title, but begins, “Your life is your life. Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission…” Do you know it?
You’re right. No punches from Charles.
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lol Teri, it is indeed kind of wolfy! I have no control over these things. They emerge as they emerge. I’ve done a few self-portraits over the years and they all turn out strange. None of them really look like me either. Have you ever tried doing a self-portrait exercise? It’s where you look in the mirror and draw without really looking at your hand or the paper. It’s kind of cool. You get things that look something like this mandala.
I don’t know that particular poem from Bukowski but now I want to look it up. Who else would use the phrase “clubbed into dank submission.”
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Wolfman,
I’ve never tried this exercise, but maybe I will this afternoon. I’ll let you know how I turn out.
You’ll love the Bukowski poem. My prediction.
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Teri, yes, let me know how your self-portrait comes out. My rule of thumb: it doesn’t have to look like you. Hence, alter-ego.
Hey, I think that poem is called The Laughing Heart (1996). There is a version read by Tom Waits on YouTube. I guess you could say Tom Waits is sort of the music genre version of Charles Bukowski. I used to listen to Waits when I lived in Montana in my twenties. Here’s the video:
Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukowski – The Laughing Heart
Here is the poem. It’s one of those that would be good to read for Poem In Your Pocket Day:
The Laughing Heart
by Charles Bukowski
your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.
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Quoin,
I like the YouTube, and glad to know the title “The Laughing Heart.”
I drew my alter-ego. I look like a dopey librarian with an especially long forehead.
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Teri, oh, good, I’m glad you tried the exercise. Now you can see how Wolfman turned out the way she did. 8) Maybe the librarian can keep wolfman company. Maybe you’ll save it and show it to me. A librarian doesn’t seem like such a large stretch for you. I can see it as an alter-ego.
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I have not read much Bukowski, but now I will have to. I love this poem, The laughing heart….a good one to memorize.
I am curious about the first one, The Continual Condition, and the last line about how we are dreaming of the albatross. Do you think he is referring to the ways in which we long for something bigger, better, with more wingspan, rather than just facing who we are in the moment? I had to look up Albatross because I forgot what that bird looked like. Apparently it is the largest flying bird. Perhaps there is a deeper meaning I am not getting upon this first reading.
I’m terrified of self portraits. I’ve written a few poems and never like them. Always amazed at artists who manage to focus their art in this direction. Thanks for sharing yours.
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Teresa, I was curious about the albatross, too, and looked up definitions and symbolism. I’m not sure how Bukowski meant it, but I ended up taking it a couple of different ways. I have a friend with an albatross tattoo and remember talking to her about the symbolism years ago. To her, it was a symbol of good, of soaring, riding the wind, a higher vantage point. Yet an ordinary bird. Ordinary as extraordinary.
An albatross is also used as a word meaning something that hinders us, a weight around our neck, shoulders, soul. I think you can take it either way in the poem. And like you said, either way, we are not being present to what is right in front of us.
The info below is interesting, too. The part about Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and wearing the albatross around the neck, an individual cross to bear and not that of the whole. I found all this in the Online Etymology Dictionary. A lot to ponder. Yin an yang. And that’s what I love about poetry. Everything, distilled down to its essence.
__________________
Albatross: 1670s, probably from Sp./Port. alcatraz “pelican” (16c.), perhaps derived from Arabic al-ghattas “sea eagle” [Barnhart]; or from Port. alcatruz “the bucket of a water wheel” [OED], from Arabic al-qadus “machine for drawing water, jar” (from Gk. kados “jar”), in reference to the pelican’s pouch (cf. Arabic saqqa “pelican,” lit. “water carrier”). Either way, the spelling was influenced by L. albus “white.” The name was extended, through some mistake, by English sailors to a larger sea-bird (order Tubinares).
Albatrosses were considered good luck by sailors; figurative sense of “burden” (1936) is from Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) about the bad luck of a sailor who shoots an albatross and then is forced to wear its corpse as an indication that he, not the whole ship, offended against the bird. The prison-island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay is named for pelicans that roosted there.
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Oh, Teresa, about self-portraits, I can sure appreciate your comment. The ones I’ve done have always been strange. I’m a better photographer than I am an illustrator, and drawing is not my strong suit. But in art school visual arts, we all had to draw and learn about color and form, so I had to get over it and show what I had done. It was hard to have work up next to people that could really draw and had so much talent in that area. We were regularly critiqued on our work, too, so I had to develop a thick skin.
With the BlackBerry 52 Project with Lotus, I can try all kinds of things and have them not be perfect. It’s whatever we can do in a few hours, a night, a day. It’s kind of fun to play with because I don’t have to get it right. A lot of what red Ravine is about is process, sharing the creative process, and I do love that. Thanks again for stopping by! Always a pleasure.
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Hi QM, what a great post. I love how you wove it into Charles Bukowski’s works, too. (And thank you for that quote. When I re-read it this morning, it truly struck me as being just what I needed to hear.)
Your self-portrait is so charming. I love your nose, especially, kind of wide and wavy. You could hail from my family with that nose! 8) But mostly, what I love is how whimsical this is, true folkart.
I’ve been doing several self portraits of late, starting with the one I did in my Farewell post on red Ravine in which I resemble former Libyan dictaor Moammar Gadhafi (whose name is spelled about 14 different ways, so I don’t feel bad misspelling it in my self-portrait). 8) The next self-portrait I did looked had me looking like a man with red hair, and in the next one I looked like an elderly woman I used to work for. Ha!
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Thank you, ybonesy. It is a great quote from Bukowski. So much truth in it. And thanks for the comment about the self-portrait. I find noses particularly difficult to draw proportionally. Then again, it does kind of resemble the basic shape. I like self-portraits that take on another persona of the person who drew it. I tend to like art that is not an exact replica or photographic in nature but more raw. I’ve been having fun with the BlackBerry 52 dance with Lotus. I like that it gets me, sketching again, something I had not done in a long, long time.
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