"Call and Response: Multiple Histories"

 

"The freely associating mind is able to pass across time barriers, sensing the future and reappraising the past. Our minds are time machines, able to sense the flow of possibility waves from both the past and future." 

 Fred Alan Wolf

Imagine (if you will) that your reality (as you have come to understand your reality) is not a stagnant construct. Oh,to the contrary. Yes,imagine then, your reality as fluid: a stream flowing once forward and then receding. A tide that provides  both the ebb and flow of concrete being.Surface providing a reflexion of mixed vision. You staring at you staring

at you.

 Imagine (as you can) that you have uncrated the masterpiece of your own specific being. And heralded its arrival, setting it out for public display. Imagine (and you will) that erudite critics proclaim that you and you and you deserve the highest acclaim.

Oh happy day. Save the article for your scrapbook. 

And your mother.

"The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”   Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Photo credits:

1.  Workmen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, uncrating "The Madonna of the Rosaries," a painting by Caravaggio on loan from the Austrian government, 1950.

2. Volunteers at an empathinc. event unpacking, "The Ditch Digger", a painting by Scott Avett, on loan from Scott Avett (Avett Brothers Nation), ArtStorySpirit, 2012. Photo by Daniel de Wit.

While comprehending both the conveniences and pitfalls of a Cause and Effect existence, 

here at empathinc. we prefer to live in a Call and Response Universe. 
This series is an exploration of that space. 

 

"Call and Response: The Shadowed Folds"

The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. “You must change your life,” he said. When true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.” 

Ursula K. Le Guin, “Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction”, Parabola I (4), Fall 1976

Wouldn't it be marvelous if you could trace the lineage of your personal history around and around through the turnings of the labyrinth that is time? Your narrative would serve as the thread that is Ariadne's yarn, wound up in a representation of your own spiral DNA. From the Joadian dust fields to the Hubblian star fields - your  
land would be made for you and you.

Or what if you snip out disparate images and pasted them in your memory as an alternate reality? Could you smudge out the edges and

mollify your editing? Peel back the shadowed folds and peek beneath the layers? 
Could you let go of the string and risk being lost? Accept being lost? Embrace being lost? What then might you find in the tracing? In the yarn?

 

If You Go Far Enough Out 

If you go far enough out 

you can see the Universe itself, 

all the billion light years summed up time 

only as a flash, just as lonely, as distant 

as a star on a June night 

if you go far enough out. 

And still, my friend, if you go far enough out 

you are only at the beginning - of yourself. 

Rolf Jacobsen  




Photo Credits:

1.  Jack Whinery, homesteader, and his family. Pie Town, New Mexico, October 1940. Reproduction from color slide (tinting without permission by empathinc.). Photo by Russell Lee. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress 

2. Tom Schulz, artist, and some of his family (Mrs Tommie Bolton, Mary de Wit, Billy Schulz, Tomschulzartist, Johntheplantman). Columbus, Georgia, guessing 1965, photographer unknown (guessing Jane Schulz, could be William H. "Bill" Schulz).

3.  Grandmother amusing her young companion in the waiting room of the Greyhound Bus Station, New York City, July 1947. (Courtesy of the National Archives)

4. Nephew amusing his older aunts (Frances and Irma Hochstein) in the living room of Their Apartment. Most likely Washington DC. (Courtesy of the Green File Folder).

While comprehending both the conveniences and pitfalls of a Cause and Effect existence, 

here at empathinc. we prefer to live in a Call and Response Universe. 
This series is an exploration of that space. 

"Call and Response: Wisdom"

"They fought a real revolution....and that meant every man was equal in the sight of Nature - with an equal chance. This didn't mean that twenty per cent of the people were free to rob the other eighty per cent of the means to live." Carson McCullars, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, (1940)

If it were'nt for this, it wouldn't of been that. And that's the God's own truth, as far as I have known it to be true. Welcome to Wisdom.

Now you? You might a known it in a different light: but you and me - both of us - known it to be the one and the same thing.
That is the way of the

world. And that is the way of the whirled.
So be it.

Once and of a time, things was different. You had your way. And me?, I had mine.
But things was not the way that they is now. Cause first off: times they've changed. What was once again slow and of a particular motion is now
sped up and sped up again so as not to be recognized
(nor reconciled)
in the moment that we once thought of as now. And that's just the way of it, like it or not it is of no matter to us.

And the young people? The young people, they know of which I speak, for they and they alone, have known the particular now
as their now. It has no Presidents, this now. No, for this now is one and of a kind. Like the hares that is amongst both the garden and the moon and the yarn.Feeding hear and yon upon what is all and all the cultivated and the wild.
Carrots be dammed.
Like vast concrete abutments across the span of our understanding. Such is: Wisdom

Photo Credits:

1. Wisdom, Montana, April 1942. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by John Vachon. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
2. Concrete, North Carolina, June 2006. Reproduction from digital camera. Photo by Tom Schulz. Prints and Photographs Division, Empathinc.
3. A welder who works in the round-house at the Chicago and Northwestern Railway Company's Proviso yard. Chicago, Illinois, December 1942. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Jack Delano. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
4. An artist who works at the Wesmont Station Project. Wood-Ridge, New Jersey, March 2012. Download from mobile phone. Photo by Daniel de Wit. No prints in the Library of Congress

While comprehending both the conveniences and pitfalls of a Cause and Effect existence, here at empathinc. we prefer to live in a Call and Response Universe. This series is an exploration of that space.

Thanks to John Schulz for this link:
http://extras.denverpost.com/archive/captured.asp

"Call and Response: Bio Degradable"

"Resentment is the most precious flower
of poverty. Yeah."
Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" (1940)

I don't know if this ever happens to you. It happens to me. This is what happens: I begin something and it takes on a life and complexion of its own. That's good. But then as if the project were some conceptual chigger bite, I begin to worry it. Scratch at it. Scratching turns into embellishment. Stop me if this is new to you and I'll make every effort to
add details.Before I am aware, a concept that may have been sublime and elegant as
birthed, becomes bloated and ungainly.
That's when (if I am paying any attention at all), I stop. I sweep up. I evoke repairs.
I let the air out of the balloon.
I risk making mistakes. I
walk away from the preciousness of anticipation and preconceived desire.
I wear an aluminum foil hat and avail myself to the
unknown.
That is what I am going through right now. In eliminating the barriers that are the corral separating out the herd of who I am from the herd of what I do, I have constructed some free-ranging Golem. I have fashioned a simulacrum of my self. The hands molding the image are mine. The clay is the stuff of my inheritance, held together by the spit of my essential self.
You are there.And
we are connected at the intersection of effort and dream. Whirled without end.
Amen/Yeah.


“He saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings—all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor. they went on forever and were forever incomplete, far from perfect, refined, or smooth, full of terrible memories of failure and fears of failure, yet, in the way of things, somehow noble, complete, and shining in the end…” Jack Kerouac: The Town and the City, (1950)

While comprehending both the conveniences and pitfalls of a Cause and Effect existence, here at empathinc. we prefer to live in a Call and Response Universe. This series is an exploration of that space.