2023 has been a year of recovery. I don’t believe I published a single book in 2022. I experienced in that year the very first complete year with both of my parents gone. Neither of them died of Covid, but I lost both of them during the pandemic. My father died of Parkinson’s Disease in 2020. My mother died of heart and kidney failure the year after in 2021. Then in 2022, I came down with Covid Omicron Variants twice even though I took every vaccine and booster I could up to the time I first came down with it. Depression, fatigue, and serious degradation of both my ability to see color due to increasing color blindness and my loss of some of my drawing skills due to arthritis.
My sons have both left me behind, the former Marine now going to college on a military scholarship in Oklahoma, and my number-two son joining the Air Force. My daughter is still at home, but she is an independent adult in most of the ways that matter, and I am now more or less unemployed in the job of parenting, really for the first time since 1981 because when I became a teacher I was suddenly swamped with fatherless boys and girls who attached themselves to me as the significant adult father-figure in their lives. I didn’t become a parent of my own children until 1995. And now that I am no longer really accepted in my wife’s religion for reasons of atheism and agnosticism, as well as retired from teaching, there are no more captive audiences in my life. (My wife only talks at me rather than to me… for reasons of atheism and agnosticism.)
My books do not really take the place of having a captive audience to carry the big pencil in front of. When you write a manuscript, it never laughs at your jokes… or at you when a joke fails spectacularly. You don’t really get feedback from a book the way you do from a captive audience… even an audience of sixth-grade non-readers. It is a one-way conversation with nobody but whatever fools make the mistake of picking up one of my books and actually reading it. To be fair, though, there are some who read and review my books to tell me how well I connected with them across the void. Mostly being an author means speaking into the void to the greater universe and the future, where whatever answers or echoes you get come only after you are dead. It is frustrating to put on a show with all your best tricks now refined… to a visibly empty theater.
But I have rediscovered my writing mojo (hiding under my bed with stacks of old notebooks and drawings and Paffooney-making materials.) And I bought an electronic stylus and a Chromebook computer with a touch screen to start doing digital art. (The Chromebook, however, died a mysterious virus-related death before I had it a year, making me regret not buying the Best-Buy warranty that usually is only a waste of money.) I started doing art digitally, a process much easier to make corrections and changes on. And I even found an AI program called AI Mirror that can edit my art and remove entire ranges of mistakes I could never alter before. (This last thing proved crucial because the only touch screen I had access to was the tiny one on my phone where my fat, arthritic fingers make whole ranges of mistakes.)
Naked Innocence
To be clear, I will have to write a post called Naked Experience to go with this post. It is a William Blake style of thing. You know, that English Romantic Poet guy who was into drawing naked people even more than me? The writer of Songs of Innocence and Experience? You know, this stuff;
Well, maybe you don’t know. But Blake gave the world the metaphor of the innocent lamb and the tyger of experience (tyger is his spelling, not mine, and it didn’t blow up the spell checker, even though it made the thing unhappy with me again). There is a certain something I have learned about nakedness that I mean to innocently convey. I learned it from anatomy drawing class and spending time with nudists. Naked is not evil. Naked is not pornography. Nakedness, itself, is a very good thing.
At this point the avid clothing-wearers among you are probably saying to yourself, “This guy is nuts! If God had wanted us to be nude, then we wouldn’t have been born with clothes on.” And I must admit, I cannot argue with logic like that.
But on a more serious note, I believe nudity is a fundamentally essential part of the nature of art. After all, pictures of naked people are a central part of what people have been drawing since they first started etching them with charcoal on cavern walls. And all art, including this blog, is about the human experience. What it means to be human. What it feels like to be alive on this Earth and able to feel.
And there is nothing sinister and immoral in drawing nudes to portray that fact. I am trying to show metaphorically the music of existence, the pace, the symmetry, the musical score… It isn’t focused on the private bits, what some call the naughty parts, even when those things are present in the picture. “How dare that naughty Mickey show the naked back end of that butterfly! It ought to have pants on at least!” Yes, I am making a mockery of that outrage itself. I am not a pornographer. These pictures were not created to engender any prurient interests. These pictures are part of Blake’s lamb. They will not bite you. Though blue-nosed people who wish to control what others think may very well bite me for daring to say so.
I have posted a lot of writing and artwork on this blog that I held for the longest time to be completely private and personal. I hardly ever showed any of it to anybody before I posted it here. But I am old. I no longer have secrets. I am capable of telling you everything even though I have never met most of you in real life. And I have no shame. I have become comfortable with emotional and intellectual nudity. And when I am dead, the body I have kept hidden from the world for so long will be no more. It’s just a thought. It’s a naked thought. And it is completely innocent.
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Filed under artists I admire, artwork, commentary, humor, nudes, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as art, literature, nudes, poetry, William Blake