Milo and the artist sat by the pool and watched as the swimmers practiced their strokes and built endurance, the coach sounding calls, ordering this drill and that one, barking starts and monitoring precision, the team’s youthful skin glistening in blue water, the green or blue of flags and lane dividers offset against the array of lovely tones flashing above the surfaces or as shadows beneath: copper, bronze, anthracite, and golden. The parents observed from their deck chairs or under umbrellas in the shade. The older athletes in the far end of the olympic-sized aqua rectangle, or aquamarine, set into the ground, concrete painted pale white, but the biochemistry painting the scene a more attractive hue. The splashes, yells and peals of the children’s laughter echoing from the vertical wall of the gymnasium, the club. Inside, the members could peer through the tinted glass at the scene from the weight or aerobic halls, where they exercised, sweat glistening from their skin, wiping themselves with bleached towels, iPods feeding audio through headphones to their ears. Or they could watch television on a couple dozen channels – movies, news, commentary, reality TV, sitcoms, and commercials – while they jogged or biked in place. A patio outside on the third floor deck was empty of souls. Banners decorated the scene. The wall faces west and the sun was setting. One clock kept time for the swimmers and coaches. One kept time for the rest. A few relaxed in hot tubs. The smallest children were situated nearby in the baby pool or the childcare room. Parents periodically strode across the pool deck in business suits to gather their broods from the young caregivers in whose charge they had left the little ones. The swimmers ranged in age from six to eighteen. Maybe a hundred were swimming that day. The coach was assisted by three or four helpers, each of whom possessed a certain style of instruction, though none present doubted the authority of the senior coach, who had held his position for many years, decades, and his coaching style was equal parts DI and badger (although his love of his charges and duties was like a rarely seen but forever present mythical thing). He was old school, crew cut, an old military man weathered by the California sun. His white teeth flashed in smiles and grimaces. His admonitions, orders and encouragement never failed to pierce the attention of those in the vicinity, especially the one in his sights. The atmosphere might be described as respectful of achievement, a fun place of purpose. The air quality here is terribly poor.
Milo: Socrates, you say, in his cave, made this.
PM: No. I thank him first, then Plato, but there is no brief list of gratitude that would tell truly of the debt. I practiced boxing, Muay Thai and variations, Western style boxing, mostly Irish and Mexican styles, though the study of individual fighters yields much, Kali, Kung Fu (Koji sho from Okinawa), Hsing-I, Baqua, Tai Chi, Chi Kung, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Chin Na and others. Plus Yoga, Anusara and Ashtanga. I moved in the far end of the pool that day, against the resistance of the water, the vehicle for dreaming. Right and left, hands, feet, knees and elbows, kicks and punches, bobbing and weaving, blocks and counters, against my imaginary foe, shadowboxing. I do this nearly every day. The sun was sinking behind the hedge and palms you see over there, and I could see its variable light through the leaves as I spun and dipped. Then I noticed something marvelous and wondrous and mystical. Do you see the recessed rim of the pool? This is where the displaced water drains. The concrete of the surface is quite beautiful, by the way, a mottled gray. Concrete can seem like marble sometimes, in a certain light, or even more lovely by degree. I had a friend, an architect, my china, from Mauritius, whose wife taught me Yoga. As a couple they introduced me to Tibetan Buddhism. Through the auspices or sponsorship of my friends, this couple, I received an empowerment via their teachers, the monks, at a monastery in New York, and this architect so loved concrete. Well, I noticed the Holy Glow of light in the recession. It is specific. Everyone knows it, unlike Dan Flavin or Stephen Antonakos or James Turrell.
MILO: Yes. The world was bathed in this light after I partook of my first martini. My first love appeared to float in such light. It is the intersection of the tangible and intangible, is it not?
PJM: You are ever the realist, Milo. Never mind: we shouldn’t think of our perception as a translatable language, anyway. ...At first I was amazed, because who would think a vision might arrive in such circumstances, with no object centered in the glow?
MILO: The artist assumes glow and object to be in communion.
PJM: I was befuddled, honestly, my friend, but after all these years and so many such moments, one knows not to waver, but to hold. I peered about, for I know that science explains in part most such phenomena, that it is necessary to salvaging one’s dignity later, to verify whether a general law is apparent and not a visitation of the spiritual sort that shapes the perception or distorts the Truth or bends the mind into superstitious disarray.
MILO: The synapses’ flare, you mean. I am impressed that you were not petrified by your sight, under these conditions. I would be.
PJM: Reaction is likely a function of training, and therefore a solid measure. So I witnessed that the glaring orb of the sun reflected brightly, so as to blind the eyes, from one of the third floor windows. My position in the water, the point I had chosen for my exercise, determined to a degree by the predisposition of the swim practice in the preponderance of the eastern end of the pool, where the swimmers swam their course perpendicular to my placement, under the supervision of their masters, predicted the angles of my view, again to some degree. One wonders at chance, here, for what if I had chosen, as I have on occasion prior to undertake my own practice further south in the pool? Only one point in the geometry yielded my particular perspective.
MILO: Destiny and destination are rooted the same.
PJM: Though neither is pre-scripted for a common person, except by a narrator or chorus. Again, with experience and sufficient instruction, one learns to answer the question with the certainty that the evolved man’s sequence of chosen paths lead to just such occurrences, that such happenstance is not coincidental, in the sense that strict rationalists conceive to erode general reliance on intuition, which they consider a sure precursor for faulty deduction.
MILO: In actuality, or so some have told me, the refinement of the so-called Seeker, who should be more aptly described as the Finder, bends will to site himself at perfect junctions, does he not, those nexuses where chaos uncoils and revelation rules, or to put it more precisely, chaos and uncertainty are obviated by the determined will or objective, which is to say, the choice among choices formed of the senses, in order to heighten awareness of the planes of existence and cognition and so on, and the manner in which they operate in tandem.
PJM: The ancient practitioners of “walking without being seen” knew the rules and exceptions of reason, and knew to teach their students the methods by which the senses are subverted to energetic flow. I have Rudy to thank, and the other scholars of war, plus a thousand thousand nights of unremembered battles that provided and still do the refinement of tactics, strategies and martial skill. For discernment with regards the setting of one’s course in both waking and the other, punctuated by action, the outcome in every instance is potentially terminal, so one is certain of the success of one’s exploits the night before on the next day’s dawning.
MILO: You have vaguely spoke about these ceremonial conflicts to me in the past, usually when I have inquired out of care for your wellness, when the pallor of your flesh wanes, your eyes scan strangely, and you mumble of horizons of spear tips and monsters and voids. I would not share those dreams with you, old friend.
PJM: We discourse confidentially, but the secret remains so, in spite of the desire to call attention to a task well accomplished. Aside from the whole of the outcome for those innocent of malice, though, naught about it deserves pride except efficacy. This episode we are considering is another matter. Therefore, I could see how the sun shone in the window, and how somehow that reflected light came to be glowing just there on the edge of the pool, and in the recessed hollow of the pool drain. The spread was only two arm lengths. In the concavity, I saw eventually the droplets of water, mirroring like stars in the night sky the bright rays of the setting sun, and I am sure that I noticed a rainbow in one of them. This is significant to me, because of my ongoing relationship with the island of Kauai, though that is another story, albeit it is necessary to note that a spectrum of light is present in each droplet’s brilliant spherical shaped surface.
MILO: You refer to a hoop.
PJM: Yes.
MILO: Tell me what next occurred.
PJM: The water drops twinkled, my friend, as I swayed slightly in a sort of suspension to and fro, for now I was attuned to the presence of this happening, this gateway, this peculiar enlightenment, and great joy visited upon me, tempered by realization and the revelations, the flood of convergence of so many threads of experiences, shared and autobiographical, with the accompaniment of emotion – sorrows, bliss, and all a human knows in between. At such times, for this man, it is all I can do, to not burst outward from within, to perish on the spot fulfilled. Please don’t remind me of drama, Milo. It is you I trust to tell and no other.
MILO: We are truly friends.
PJM: I speak of this with the utmost humility, for I need only remind myself why I must practice in water, because my wrists have been broken stupidly in staged conflict, and all those further painful misadventures to which I submitted or stumbled through as a clay figurine passed to and fro among gods and goddesses, whose whims an English major from Notre Dame would be well aware of, and he would also be well aware of the nefarious distractions, and the temptations of dissolution, and the consequences of engaging either and all, of living life, and all this and more, perhaps the totality of a life or a hundred thousand lives. I admit my thoughts became too rushed and insistent briefly.
MILO: Even the staunchest adherence to control must be released at the moment of surrender. A lover by Tantra, this tension is my partner and attends each caress and sigh.
PJM: (Laughing) You are most definitely a spirit of body. ...Like a rounded, water-burnished stone in the palm of the hand, or the slow coiling of clouds above in the blue pushed by unseen winds, or the swirls and eddies in a mountain stream or wide river, or the incessant crash of ocean waves on sandy beach, the steadying influence of silencing thought, the clearing of detritus from the optics of time and Truth, the mechanics of viewing: I invoked; for this was my time to be the tree or the mountain. In the water, tears are only saltier, and diffuse in the greater whole just the same, until it is all one, and perhaps ever was.
MILO: No shame in this.
PJM: Mine is no grand tale, no story of difference, not unique as such things go. I am no more worthy than the next, nor less.
MILO: Because you are my friend, I object, and must insist on my own qualifications to ratify or reject your own analysis, especially of self.
PJM: Fair enough.
PJM: ...I recognized precisely, or accepted then, that hallowing hollow to contain the Holy Glow. It is probably humorous or ironic that I spent the most precious jewel of my colorful life considering the industry of it in parts. I am of course sheepish after the fact that this was my immediate response, but how can one evade the nature that arrives with one upon the instant of one’s liberation?
MILO: So true.
PJM: Those qualities or characteristics are the garment that clothes the body on this wheel of suffering, on this ladder to heaven, in this dream in which the orb is either self-propelled or destined, and no one can know, for that is this nature, of this place, which has its own history and Truth.
MILO: You wax earthenly now. I mistook our reveries to have veered towards poetics, or metaphysics, or the theological. Your artistry is approaching the animistic.
PJM: Is not the Earth very much alive? How could it not be? Is not its history unknown and unknowable for us two-leggeds of the mind, who crave evidence and lineage, the soothing tenor of a voice to tell us how this or that happened? What is, beyond the archeological explanation, the footprint of a giant and terrible lizard set in stone, or a field of trees made of rock, or a cave on whose walls a fellow traveler painted with breath and spit and colored dust the outline of his living hand, or the shape of a buffalo, or his brother heaving a spear?
MILO: All the same, for faith is as compelling when one is alone as reason is when shared among the crowd.
PJM: I knew the sun was setting, I could see its parts through the leaves of the hedge, but that day the sun’s circumference escaped my gaze, as one supposes, the sun always has, so far away the scientist tells me, hovering in the darkness of space, embarked on a circular journey of rotation on an invisible axis, in league with other bodies, all rotating, susceptible to gravity and inertia and other universal laws and bindings, burning brightly of itself, feeding all life and vision here on this planet, bound to outlive my body by uncounting years, perhaps in union with a greater movement that explains all.
MILO: Hmm. This is the mystery of the celestial congregation, of conflagrations of spheres, the phenomenon that must force men to gaze upward, to imagine formal arrangement, to infer meaning, to seek solace from the normal cruelties of mortal affairs, to appreciate wonder as a remedy for the wounds of striving.
PJM: But what of my parents, sick in a hospice and hospital only two thousand miles away, or my own son, living his unknowable life a thousand miles away, or sweet Lula, who was I think at the time at home, or maybe working out in the aerobics room, not far away, or Rudy, dead now these several years, or my other beloved friends and teachers, and I must mention Servando, but there is also French, Marcel, Joan and Daphne, et alia? Or the unnumbered acquaintances, or encounters, or lovers, allies, collaborators, peers, enemies, hecklers, instructors, advisors, counselors, students, apprentices, brothers, cousins, ancestors, and what of the descendents, the relatives? Do they share in this?
MILO: Beneath the stars we are all the same, and above the ground, not.
PJM: Are the Buddhists right, or Descartes: is Nietzche correct; or Sam Wounded Head, or my Uncle Bob, who returned from Pork Chop Hill a described warrior, proved and a man? What if they contributed in sum to the totality of this vision, with word, deed, sign or gesture, communicated thought or cultured indication?
MILO: They are only the similar forces! What of all the other sorts: the animals, vegetables and minerals; the advertisements; the signs; the signals? What of decay? What of inertia and entropy? What of the French? What of your books? What of the millions of sheets of paper? What of the wind on the grass on the plains of Nebraska, where you stopped on the highway to relieve yourself, trucks passing furiously by, a vulture on a high tension wire not far distant?
PJM: Be serious, Milo! Yet, who am I to reject the notion that the vicious criminal kicking my skull with steel-toed boots outside the Canyon Bar in Pecos provided any less a kindness than the beautiful servant of artists who caretakes the compound of Morris Graves, or, as you might have suggested before, my first true love Kellie Graves, killed by a drunk in a car on the eve of her graduation, or the long-lost Mike Varlotta, with whom I first journeyed to Death’s edge and returned, when our motorcycle’s chain snapped, police in pursuit, drunken, Mike scalped on that STOP sign, me bleeding out from a hole in my head in the yard of the school for the mentally handicapped?
MILO: Who is the realist now?
PJM: Violence forms and informs, does it not? The swoosh of crimson on the silver painted hood of the cruiser is no less lovely, if temporal, than Jackson’s finest splash. That a dream stick made the mark and the action was essentially collaborative should not alter the definition, if the medium is life itself.
MILO: I know you do not believe this for your own painting.
PJM: For the artist must not revel only in Beauty, but in Reality, and not a reality of books or words only, although I love both so, or that bedevilment the other’s truth, but the Reality that is shocking and often painful, the one that is present and undeniable in sum, and thus must be denied in the precious jeweled moment.
MILO: How does the axiom manifest in our current cultural flow?
PJM: It is a Thermopylae for aesthetes. In my case, bringing to bear the layered imagination, I sought to draw dotted and whole lines over the scene, to establish a dimensional context, to assess the dynamic symmetry should one exist, to map the event as a static geometry, as if that might be helpful to dictate terms in reverse upon what clearly was a non-static unfolding of elements, revealed in an unmapped portion of the universe, specialized in nothing, uncontained by any force or limiting agent.
MILO: My, the presence of mind!
PJM: You should not jest so. The tools do not reveal the hand without the grasp of the mind. Through the dimensional lens, I discerned that my body could not or did not inhibit the reflected light in its arc or trajectory from the sun to the window (and through the filtering leaves), to animate the planar configuration of varied surfaces. Among them it moves, if that is the right word, on glass, on concrete, on water, through leaves and air. My language fails to describe what light does or is on those surfaces, for it is not permanent, except in experiential or mathematical realms. Yet it seems to be. In truth, all of these qualities of happening are failed by my ability to describe them.
MILO: I would say I understood, as a consolation, but clearly this is more a failure of rhetorical breadth than content.
PJM: You are kind, Milo. I fear emotion colors the telling, and told the story circular aims. I wish not to be a narcissist.
MILO: After all, you are an artist, not a poet or philosopher. I will observe the rest in your next painting.
PJM: It will be a sequence of paintings, a series bound by narratives and ambient sound, hung vertically but animated and translucent. No, it will be transparent on the horizontal and I will use photographs. I will build specification models and execute drawings, and my video and animations will provide the underpinnings of this argument.
MILO: It will be a fabulous exposition!
PJM: We will discuss it another time. Already, I am growing weary. You must forgive me, but I must hurry to disclose the rest.
MILO: Please. Proceed.
PJM: I changed my position slightly to see if my body might cast a shadow on the Holy Glow, and I admit I resisted approaching too closely the edge of the pool, for I am monoptical, and heights always make me afraid, or the ending of one plane of existence and the beginning of another, as I am unsure of my footing when it depends on seeing, and so I have sought mentoring in the 4th Dimension by specialists, and have tutored myself in their absence, though that is not exactly correctly phrased, for one does not tutor oneself there, but one is tutored by the worlds beyond one. ...
MILO: My friend?
PJM: This is what I can disclose for now. All I can recall, or bear to say. I am tired, old friend and exhausted. The exhibit in Beverly Hills, the production of which in all probability incited my reverie, has sapped me of reserves and left me with only enough - I apologize - for all the first-person required to tell the story - for - if I could – (mumbling) - and leave out that I would, since it is the least important factor of all, save in this: (recovering) one must not ever shirk Freedom. No matter the evil array and foul crushing force of the foe of it. Especially, one must stand against just that, or else – and perhaps I am wrong and this again is specific to my set subsets of karma or hardened features – the dual nature cannot be passed through like the gauntlet it is to reach choice, which attains its own submission to Truth, the Truth that has no flaw, and lives beyond that 3rd Dimension, and I only wish that the fools, and ha – they have nearly at all times looked poorly upon my clumsy course – could in their rigid hypocrisies and hierocracies take leave of their leaden strictures and unchained rise, if not for the sakes of their own souls, but then for the sakes of their fellows and the innocents unborn they sonorously proclaim to love, whilst they poison their fields and waterways (but perhaps it is always so). I would wish the harder, but – Milo – I have no more defense against acceptance, nor will against the willfully ignorant. They defeat themselves with greater grace and precision than I could ever accomplish. Their bones and mine will commingle someday, maybe, so I shouldn’t fuss. For my neighbor this fair morning at 8AM was carted away to hospital amidst sirens and fire fighters, complaining limply of stomach pains and a swollen groin, and his poor ashen friend, and roommate asked me to be on the lookout for a delivery of medicines, and so started this day, or every day, for we never know which one is our one last one, and so we are fortunate for this opportunity, Are we not? I love you, my old friend. Now, I will take to the water once more, before the sun sets, as it will today, as it did on the scene I disclosed to you, and on the day before.
MILO: I will go make art for that reason, and grow fat on my techne.