I’m sitting here on a sunny Sunday off, looking ahead to spring and just vibing off of my everyday life right now. In my mind is a sort of thermal, spiraling sense of bright spirit — I’m not sure if it’s because I work with Jamaican people now or what (literally in the kitchen five out of the 10 people are from Jamaica and speak in the accent and everything) [1].
Anyway, in these moments of happiness, when you’re feeling the sun and you’re feeling the spirit, it might be natural to pinpoint a sort of rudiment, a founding microcosm of the effect. The rudiments mimic the larger whole and cannot be sold on Amazon — they cannot be criticized, replicated, patented or owned [2].
Hopefully, by now, we all know that material wealth does not buy happiness. I used to live in Boulder, Colo., and it was pretty much the epitome of a nightmare. Not to completely generalize, but I encountered a considerable sequence of people who seemed just unable to enjoy every moments — having an axe to grind, complaining, and insisting on acting like they had a problem or that you were a problem. Then, I have a definitive memory of flying back to Chicago, close to my native northern Indiana, getting in a rental car an seeing this old black dude on a bike, near the highway somewhere around midway, on a cloudy, 37-degree day in March, with a smile plastered across his face, Dexter Fowler style.
Tangents aside, I was thinking of a logo for my impending poetry book, should it be selected for publication (nothing guaranteed or even suggested at this point), and for some reason my mind sort of flowed like a lecherous liquid to a kind of abstract animal form, kind of like the diver portrayed on the cover of this Winwood album pictured above. The same goes for my plans for my next painting on my wall — I want a Matisse blue nude. By abstracting, you’re loosening the shackles, through Impressionism, roughly, on the definition of what is to take place. A concrete, definitively rendered animal has needs. It has a hungry belly, and ego, a standard to be met and an inclination toward violence. An incomplete being, rather, has no power to destroy. It can, however, trigger a process in our minds, like a call to action or an impetus to self-define, the result of its de facto signification upon sight.
It’s appropriate to me, too, that this illustration earmarks a Winwood album, he being a musical figure epitomizing “less talk more rock.” Contrasted with others who might be inclined to indulge us in public platitudes and sob stories, Winwood quietly seems to go about his business, toward the procurement of a hit single with four different acts (Traffic, Blind Faith, Spencer Davis Group, solo), and “Back in the High Life again”; which I’m pretty sure was in my head for about six months straight at some point back in 2014.
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[1] Astoundingly, one of the dudes, probably in his early 30s or so, talks in an accent which I remarked on as sounding like Peter Tosh’s speaking voice, then to provide me the info that he’s actually from the same Jamaican region as Tosh, Westmoreland Parish. He’s even well-versed in Tosh lore and has seen a documentary on him.
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[2] On this note, I am a sort of part-time, sloppy student of the Jungian archetypes, which probably aren’t galaxies removed from what I’m discussing here.
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