So, yeah, the title. Kinda lame, right? Well, it’s all about a new riff, a certain spin, a re-imagining of the previous post, in which I wax philosophical about ancient times.
Ancient times and ancient vistas. We all have them, if we live long enough. And some of us feel that way even in our late teens about our earlier teens, as was the case with my friends and me, one of whom passed away well before his time, like Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi. Way before.
We would drink and laugh and listen to The Doors, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Humble Pie, as if we were looking back from twenty years into the future, instead of two or three. Reminisce. Sadly, tragically. Think about the girls who got away. The things we should have said and done. The beauty we missed. So much beauty. And what’s more important in this life than that? Beauty and truth and guzzling rot gut whisky because we didn’t know the difference. We didn’t care about. We couldn’t afford. We were all out of. Beer. And does it really matter, domestic or imported, when you’re Rockin’ the Fillmore?
And then the concerts, and the “authorities” looking away when we. When we mixed this and that. When we. The Doors mastered that. The falling off the. The End taking years and years in Rimbaud land. The riders on a storm forever running guns in distant Abyssinia.
So, it’s possible that it wasn’t just the metal sculpture that did it, that made me go abstract. In fact, it couldn’t have been just that. It never is. And while I want to throw bottles whenever I hear “it’s complicated,” it is. Rilly, as we used to say. Icebergs, Freud, and all of that underwater stuff . . .
I was rereading Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces, and The Greek Myths by Robert Graves, and I thought: Hieros Gamos! Sacred Marriage! The Northern Sky gods invade Greece, try to replace the far more ancient Matriarchy of the Triple Goddess, but can’t quite do it, can’t quite do away with the Earth Mother, and this is the key, the Rosetta Stone. And so I painted it all in utter, frickin’ turmoil, nearly 40 years ago.
Athena’s honor!
