Last night I awoke at midnight and spent the next three hours skimming along the edge of sleep. <\/p>\n
Instead of discoursing with the demons that like to alight in those hours, I drifted in love and beauty. From a cocoon of comfort, my minds eye watched colors and shapes. Golden columns rose and dissolved. Waves of aqua and emerald and pink flowed and ebbed. Figures twisted into view before fading into mist.<\/p>\n
I understood that I was experiencing a history of art. Not viewing art from afar. Not learning about it academically, but being in<\/em> art as its been created through time.<\/p>\n When I finally fell asleep I dreamed of the fabulous Wyeths. The great illustrator<\/a> and teacher, NC<\/a>. His immortal son Andrew<\/a>, who painted death and madness, sex, suffering, rage and rocky endurance with such subtlety that foolish critics took him for a sentimental painter of quaint Americana. And Jamie, Andrew’s son<\/a>, who paints everything from presidents to pigs (but I repeat myself).<\/p>\n In my dream they weren’t three generations of a remarkable family. They were brothers. Which, in a way makes sense. They are brothers in arts. <\/p>\n In the dream they were imperiled and I needed to save them. But as is usual, the dream ended with no conclusion.<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n In the last year I’ve been embraced by art.<\/p>\n I’ve always been an aesthete to my core, and my mother’s family told tales of famous artists and writers somewhere out on the branches of our hillbilly family tree. But I’ve also always been a peasant and for the past 30 years I’ve lived in relative poverty, far from civilization, with very little opportunity to experience art outside of books or videos. <\/p>\n I studied illustration in my 20s, but I was merely good and not great at it and that frustrated me into quitting. Excuses, excuses. Today this is about the level of my skill<\/a>. And that’s when I’m trying really hard.<\/p>\n But last summer, I had chances to get close to great art, not merely by tromping through museums (though that, too), but by being a guest at the home of a fabled collector<\/a>, and discovering not only wonders of beauty, but also the wonders of friendship and love on a level entirely new to me.<\/p>\n That experience has grown on me and led me down rabbitholes I’m only beginning to explore.<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n And speaking of love, the last couple of years have — quite surprisingly to this formerly happy hermit — brought me a love I have never experienced or even dreamed of experiencing.<\/p>\n The dashing blockade runner whose blog nym is Rhett has become such a deep part of my heart that life without him pales. Yet — best of all perhaps — we not only have an unprecedented meeting of minds, souls, and bodies, but we share a grown-up<\/em> love. No dramas. No games. No desperations, jealousies, rivalries, possessiveness, or doubts. Just two long-time friends who’ve become much more than that and are finding more of ourselves and each other to explore every day.<\/p>\n And we mesh in such odd ways. Give us a problem and he will approach it analytically. I will come at it intuitively. And we will arrive at the same solution. Time and again. It’s amazingly great.<\/p>\n Sometimes I think the swell of gratitude will burst my chest.<\/p>\n Oh. And Rhett is the one who made my immersion in art possible. And he even eventually brought some of that art home, including one piece especially dear to me. I look up at what’s on the walls of his house and I really do think my heart will burst.<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n Rhett is also a freedomista and a news junkie. Just like me. We ponder whether World War 3 might be on the horizon or whether a society can recover once it’s governed by morons and fantasists.<\/p>\n That part sucks. But it’s us.<\/p>\n Aesthetics and politics. Joint inheritances from my mother. The two fit in my brain like like fighting bulldogs. Gee thanks, Ma.<\/p>\n Sure, art and political\/social commentary can go together. See Goya and Daumier and Hogarth and for that matter Jamie Wyeth in his Vietnam-era youth. <\/p>\n But they do not go together for me or in me. <\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n The above is prologue.<\/p>\n It is my way of saying why I’m quitting this blog.<\/p>\n I may post very occasionally from now on, but never again regularly, and not about The Usual Crises. The blog will remain online, but don’t expect frequent postings.<\/p>\n I’ve wanted to quit for some time and the only reason I haven’t is that I love the people who gather here and I don’t want either to lose you or to let you down. Oh, that and that I’ve needed the couple hundred dollars a month the blog still earns and the occasional lovely surprise contribution some dear old friend sends.<\/p>\n But I’ve also noticed that, as readership appears to grow and new voices join the Commentariat, the few hundred in donations grow incrementally smaller month by month.<\/p>\n This is not a complaint. Everybody is under stress. Inflation is sucking away your grocery money and the money to fuel your vehicle. You’ve also got to prep for whatever’s coming — and whatever’s coming, we can’t know what it is, but we know it won’t be pretty. I thank you for every dollar. I thank the wonderful old faithfuls, the people who’ve raised their pledges even when they couldn’t afford it, the amazingly generous, the mainstays and the newbies.<\/p>\n I will be closing my Patreon account in mid-May. If you want to cancel your monthly pledge now (before your credit card is charged on May 1), by all means do. OTOH, if you want to give me one last hearty farewell, I’ll be happy to have one last round of blog funds.<\/p>\n