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.