A Welcome to Further and Farther Voyages

If you’ve read my first post on this blog — “Welcome to Artists, Lovers of Art, and Unknown Friends” — you’ll have a good indication of my intentions here.  And if you’ve been here before, you may have noticed that I’ve upgraded the template for this site.  But that was just a prelude to more significant changes, which I hope will bring you here again and keep you coming back here each month.  I say “month” because I promise that if you come here on the first of each month, from now on you’ll find at least one new post.

I’m going to take my posts (including some audio posts) farther out and deeper in.  I’m going to offer more of what I believe are keys to what can make life a grace – or, on the other hand, an almost unbearable curse.  I believe that the best that I have to offer you is not what they teach, or want you to teach, almost anywhere in schools or elsewhere in this society.  I’m going to write about the mysteries and Mystery in art, and about mystical experiences, intuitive strategies, social delusions – as they relate at ground level to our (all-too-often fearful) lives right now.

I want to write about what expands my soul or helps me lift my head when it feels like a nearly-insupportable dead weight.  I want to give you clues, bread-crumbs to help lead you through the witch’s forest, The Matrix, to what is sometimes called satori or direct intuition of reality.  I want to write about the reality of things like the “occlumency” that Severus Snape tried to teach Harry Potter, which was for me, in my childhood, a necessary weapon against madness that threatened me through long nights of waking, sweating terror.  I want to write about the new retrospective book of Keith Carter’s photography as a fulfillment of what the poet Galway Kinnell called the central dream of art:  tenderness toward all existence.  And, yes, I’ll continue to give you samples, news and views of my own photography.

For me, this project is urgent, given how comparatively-little time either I or the rest of life on earth may have left — and given how increasingly I see us surrounded by real vampires and zombies, with poison and trash offered us as treasures, while the real treasures go neglected or undetected.  I hope to help lead you to genuine riches, to what can console or delight or deepen us, in this shared and precarious — this finite and infinite — life of ours.