Self Portrait, today, in my work van after a deck building job ended

Portrait of a Seeker: Born to Wonder

Andrée is painting this portrait-in-the-works for the cover, from a photo taken in Brittany, France, 2010.

Portrait of a Seeker: 

Born to Wonder

Destiny, Idealism,

Living Internationally

and my Search for Meaning 

 by David W. Weimer

This book is “done.”  The reason for the quotation marks is that nothing is ever done, I just stop working on it…

A shorter, more focused version of Portrait is considering entering this world in Spring 2012.  More later.

For now, I’ve just sent a 575-page manuscript to Cindy, a kind, kind friend who is helping me typeset this book in preparation for a galley printing in November, this year.

By the first of December 2011, a long- awaited book, Portrait of a Seeker, will be available for purchase at an Amazon.com website near you!  Hip, hip, hooray!

Portrait of a Seeker: Born to Wonder

Andrée is painting this portrait-in-the-works for the cover, from a photo taken in Brittany, France, 2010.

Portrait of a Seeker: 

Born to Wonder

Destiny, Idealism,

Living Internationally

and my Search for Meaning 

 by David W. Weimer

This book is “done.”  The reason for the quotation marks is that nothing is ever done, I just stop working on it…

A shorter, more focused version of Portraitis considering entering this world in Spring 2012.  More on that later.

For now, I’ve just sent a 575-page manuscript to Cindy, a kind, kind friend, who is helping me typeset this book in preparation for a galley printing in November, this year.

By the first of December 2011, a لنگ- will be available for purchase at an Amazon.com website near you!  Hip, hip, hooray!

Born to Wonder (book excerpt)

This is from my upcoming book, Portrait of a Seeker, excerpted from correspondence with a friend.  I printed two sample copies of Portrait today; man is it big--it's a phone book!  A galley proof will come out next month (after proofreading and typesetting) and a first edition printing is scheduled for the first of December.  Contact me for more information. -DW  

I feel that I have lived my potential; I accomplished something that I was born to do. It was accomplished. Not by me. I’m not the director; I’m a bystander observer. I was born to be a dreamer, a wonderer of things. I’m not implying a designer’s intentions in my makeup, although it could be there. It is just apparent that I am a certain shape and color. Fat people are fat, etc. I have always, always looked for the deep, true meaning of everything. I always felt that IT, the answer, the real reality, was there, somewhere, but people seemed contented chasing after stuff that I was convinced they knew didn’t matter.

Word associations (upcoming book excerpt)

That's part of it, she said.  Living to reproduce.  A matter of course.  To have children and a family and to be a parent and grandparent... all part of living.  That sounds so normal, logical, so right...

Super Bowl, morning paper, evening news, the weather, favorite shows on TV, going to the movies, putting gas in the car, paying bills, taxes, beer and pizza, calling family at Christmas and Thanksgiving, birthdays, big breakfast on Saturday morning, corn flakes, coffee, toast, bagel, grocery shopping, snow sledding, diapers, life insurance, check-ups, hospitals, convenience stores, malls, beef jerky, McDonalds, traveling, headaches, feeling angry, guilty, sad, happy, daydreaming, sleeping in, dreaming, going to the bathroom at home, restroom at restaurant, eating out occasionally, reading a book, telling the time, turning on a light in the morning, radios in cars, favorite music groups, cassettes, CDs, radio stations, eggs, milk, butter, lottery tickets, Sunday papers, pet dogs, zoos, recycling, Styrofoam, magazines, snow storms, rain, thunder-lightening, mowing the lawn, flowers, birds chirping, mosquito bites, flies, earth worms, fishing, barbeque, iced tea, Kool-Aid, Band-Aids, wrist watches, painted fingernails, pantyhose, alarm clocks, VCRs, video rental, Chinese food, exercise, football, basketball, hockey, baseball, horse racing, car racing, best seller, TV guide, cable TV, space shuttle, satellite, bright sun, moon at night, crickets, grass hoppers, deer hunting, rabbit, license plates, voting, cigarette butts, beer cans, Doritos, tooth decay, broken bones, cuts, scabs, toenails, haircuts, eyeglasses, contact lenses, baldness, wrinkles, hearing aids, bras, pants, shoes, dresses, coats, boots, gloves, hats, basketballs, quarters, spoons, lighters, matches, fireplaces, electricity, phone booths, vacuum cleaners, pencils, pens, antennae, tools, power saw, drill, hacksaw, crow bar, spare tire, concrete, asphalt, stop signs, stop lights, leaves, snow, wind, rain, bats, safety pins, vitamins, razor blades, tooth brushes, books, paperbacks, hardcover, posters, bookmarks, cardboard, plastic, wood paneling, nails, engine oil, semi truck trailers, blenders, coffee machines, coke machines, vending machines, tests, diplomas, classes, teachers, students, desks, chalkboards, glass windows, screen doors, light bulbs, famous, poor, rich, honor, coward, war, fighting, army, cannons, guns, bullets, shouting, boots, knives, stabbing, eat, sleep, bomb, weight bench, house plants, buttons, zippers, fans, sewing machines, filing cabinet, belt, underwear, neck ties, scarf, car keys, death, crying, laughing, shouting, breathing, hearing, listening, writing, telling, asking, answering, feeling, believing, remembering, wondering, silence, finishing.

David W. Weimer (c) 1992

Timeless day

When I'm walking near the fence line I'm working on, I feel the heat radiating up from the grass, twenty degrees more than the mid-90s air.  It feels like I'm walking in an open oven.  I breathe in, and the air is hot in my lungs.  I pace myself, in order to not drop from the heat.  I feel like I'm a deep sea diver on the bottom of the ocean or an astronaut trudging along the "magnificent desolation" of the surface of the moon inside my spacesuit.  In the 4x4 "Mule" parked up the hill over there, on the other side of the fence, is my water cooler, resting against a chainsaw on the metal floor of the vehicle.  It's filled with ice and colder-than-imaginable water.  When I get to the hot bench seat and sit, I hold the small blue container over my head, letting the water pour down my throat.  I can stand only three large gulps of the nearly frozen liquid at a time—pouring the arctic into a volcano.

God

How can we find nothing when we look at the center of ourselves?  You mean, at home, there’s… nothing?  Well then, what are we?  Just a nothingness looking out from—nothing? 

I think we are trapped inside of a sphere resting on the sand of a desert island.  When we stop observing the objects on the small circle of land—palm leaves, sand, birds or waves or shells, sticks and flotsam and jetsam and crabs washed up on shore—and retreat into ourselves, we feel… bored.  What?  Yes, I think that we do.  We’re so used to looking at the moving objects outside our windows; our whole attention is outward.  Even so, if we’re determined to get to the bottom of things, and we decide to start digging a hole right in the middle of where we’re standing, what will we find? 

Here there be dragons... (excerpt from my upcoming book, Portrait of a Seeker: Born to Wonder)

You’re heading off the edge of the planet, into unmapped territory governed by a solitary tyrant, well-intentioned but not clearly sane; his solitude, some have said, has been working on his head.  He is opinionated, honest, earnest and verbose in turns.  The following excepts from his correspondence with others are mere bits chipped from a vast iceberg of interaction with outsiders near and far, who, too, are working on the same arcane problems of inner meaning, truth and insight.

You are warned that this will be a lopsided read; a Siamese twin without its twin.  The voices of his partners in discussion are largely silent, save for one section at the end between himself the tyrant’s younger brother; there, the brother is permitted to speak more than the customary two sentences. 

So.  Why? You ask.  Why has the tyrant allowed only his own voice to remain un-muffled in the following pages?  Though an academic question to most, who feel the answer is self-evident, the best of speculative thinking on the matter has produced two elegantly simple guesses: first—he feels his opinions and statements contained in the following excerpts paint a better, more honest picture of his view of things than volumes of essays could, and second—this is his book, after all; let it reflect him… and let these others, referred to in initials only, say who and what they are when they write their autobiographical tomes.  Sometimes cruel and arbitrary-seeming, this tyrant (it is believed) regards publishing the private words of others… beyond.

My Own Private Tsunami, 2004 (revisited)

I was thinking about this tsunami while working on my wife’s van in the parking lot next to our apartment.  In the [now seven] years since that pondering, up till now, I’d forgotten about the tsunami and the 230,000 people it washed away.  It’s amazing how quickly time passes.  Every day I forget another tragedy where thousands upon thousands of families like mine are rubbed out in earthquakes, floods, civil wars and plagues.

Last week [I wrote a year ago], I was looking through my unfinished stuff to find something to work on.  A friend and I regularly attend a philosophic discussion group, M&M Philosophy in Wheeling and we made a 2010 New Year’s pact.  He’s an artist and I want to write, so we said we’d bring new work in every Tuesday meeting evening to show each other.

This accountability arrangement has so far prompted me to return to and finish things that may not have ever been touched again—things  I’d begun while self-employed contracting for a living.  Years pass.  I put something on my desktop, and then put it aside, then file it away.  Not returning to things is a constant threat and theme.

Forward from, "Portrait of a Seeker", my book-in-the-works

June 2011, in Saint-Médard sur Ille, Brittany, France

I am an artist, standing with raised brush and tilted head in front of my portrait, adding another stroke to my signature.  I have mixed paints, picked colors, followed feelings, left alone some things and painted over others.  Now I am signing my name on the lower right-hand corner: Seeker. 

Life comes in order, but is it orderly?  I’ve painted my sandcastle in one eternal summer day, the surf whispering its commentary into my ears while I added turrets and moats, destroyed bridges, improved walls and changed my mind. 

Some artists draw “studies” of the work they are going to feature on a canvas or ceiling, carefully considering composition and changing things until settling on how they are going to begin.  Other painters simply begin, following an impulse, adapting and improving as they work.  Another type, artist savant, lays down, intact, what was already there; a seeming instrument for the eternal creation.

This book is my painting of me and the world as I see it—maybe they’re the same.

You may search for an orderly structure within the following pages.  You may yearn for a chronological timeline or a developed context.  You can find them; they’re there. 

A person’s whole self, imbedded in the context of their life-as-lived, is impossible to hold within any frame; it would be a black canvas.  The whole “me” is best undiluted by description.  I have created this work, in this time in my life, and have stopped adding paint because it’s my soul, after all, and I don’t want to cover it up completely.

Our lives stop at the end of our day, and I wanted to say something before my sunset came because I have witnessed others, unwritten and unread, falling into their graves, to be covered by dirt. 

Here is a portrait of my fall.

 

  

—David Weimer, Flushing, Ohio, January 7, 2011.

One written in March 1999 in Memphis.

Taking on

The banana spider finds time to consider;

May humbleness be learned from a humble fly?

It spider-sips each precious drop, 

drinking humble bodies whole.

May humbleness be learned

through liquefaction?

The spider glows with the memory

of two icicles melting through a fly’s humbled thoughts.

This warm recollection summons it

from its humble questioning,

beckons,

with a silent spider tune:

A grounded spider is a humble spider,

and little will he do,

so lasso silk in humble breeze

and fasten tightly to

the joints in a corner of the sky

that a spider covers with his eyes

and a senseful touch

on a leeside thread

that sways and sighs with a thrumming web,

and the softest lies

whispered to all flies:

Here,

here lie,

in this invisible bed...

The spider

lets an empty fly fall

and re-traces his name

in the margins of a broken window.

© 1999 David W. Weimer