Papa Bear Album- Confusion and Pastime

New Papa Bear album. If you would like to purchase an album, visit bicyclerecords.com
or email me!

You can listen to it below for free!

No Words

It’s that feeling
That finds shelter in your gut
Squeezing and twisting.
A pushing up
Into your throat
Or your eyes.

It’s that enormous collision
The one that shatters your bones.
It’s when you have to explain yourself:

I am the idea.
I am the rhetoric.
I am not alone.

That deep rooted tree
toes frigid
clenching the frosted soil below.

A harsh wind bites
the deep brown oak
broken out of the frozen ground.

How far do its roots reach?

Toes ache
skyward
into the stretched branches

fingers close
a fallen leaf’s
tender body
crumbling with a gasp.

The Am

a home
erupts
in marching flames

left naked and cold
shivering in the dark

Alone

but
in a request
for the silence of a
river

smoke
rolls
gently
in the distance

Rising.

The Shower Doors

When I write I have found that I am disinterested in cataloguing what I have done. The importance, for me, is documenting the impression those experiences have had on me. When I find words for this impression, they formulate into metaphors. Sometimes I feel a societal pressure to define myself by what I do: to compare and situate myself with the portrayal of other human’s actions. What’s on the news today? What products are being bought? What are people reading? What are people wearing? What are people saying? What do people believe? What are people feeling? The responses to these questions are easy, because the words have already been given to me.
Who am I? and why do I write?

My writing is an inquiry into who I am in relation to the world. But what is this “am”? Where do I find it? Is it hiding from me? Do I seek its presence in a game, or wait for it to appear? Peek-a-boo! Is it already here, just not familiar? Or is it always changing and never recognizable?
Every time I feel the presence of who I am, I feel compelled to verify it, then create an identity around my confirmation; to trap it, but by the time I create an identity, and pull it over my body like a sweater, its fibers itch, and I no longer like the color of the yarn. I stare in the mirror, and spin, hoping that from different angles this itchy sweater will at least look better, but the more I look at it, the more I hate it, so I tear it to shreds, leaving only a pile of yarn to reflect on. This pile of yarn can be crushing. In a world filled with facts, numbers, science, explanations, morals, names and words, how do I explain the shredded remains of who I am?

This is why I write: to compile a “mobile army of metaphors” to inquire into myself. To constantly weave the yarn of life into new sweaters, always knowing that I will never look good in a sweater. It’s the process that matters. To reject what I know, or what I have been told, and continue to move to new and active revelations.
By no means am I trying to isolate myself from the world. Instead, I’m critically situating myself, so that I am aware of what ground I am moving from. Through writing, I hope to constantly critique my situation and identify my conditions, so that I have material (or yarn) to formulate ideas and then deconstruct them. This constant shaping and deconstruction disallows ideas to be absorbed. There is nothing to subscribe to, because there is constant movement and change.

Jiddu Krishnamurti in Freedom From the Known says, “For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, our saints. We say, ‘Tell me all about it - what lies beyond the hills and the mountains and the earth?’ and we are satisfied with their descriptions, which means that we live on words and our life is shallow and empty. We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves; nothing original, pristine, clear.”



I met a man in Centralia, Washington named Richart. As I drove into the town, I was confronted with Richart’s wonderful sculptures, exploding out of his yard. From afar they only look like giant towers of trash growing over his seven-foot fence, but as you near, the trash molds into intricate sculptures connecting together to make a maze of craftsmanship. I stopped in to meet Richart with a friend of mine, and he gave us a personal tour of his property.


Richart is seventy-six years old, and has been working on his “Art Yard” since he was fifty. He’s a very animated and eccentric man, and was enthusiastic when he saw us waiting at his gate. He addressed us as if we had been there for hours, “Oh hi! You’ve already seen the front? Well come look at this back here. I keep it closed off for my dog Sally. Sally! Now stop that barking, you know I hate it when you bark! Oooh come look at this, I’m just now working on this one!” He led us into his back yard, or his cathedral as he called it, and again, I was faced with the delightfully peculiar sculptures he had made from collections of garbage.

Here’s some things you can find in Richart’s yard: Styrofoam balls and blocks, rusty nails, rebar, old wood, plastic playpen balls, hammers, saws, ladders, reflectors, electrical tape, sunglasses, bike wheels, plastic wine glasses, rope, piping, and metal gates. You can find spray-paint caps, Styrofoam or plastic heads, plastic numbered boards to hang gas prices, helmets, garden tools, hangers, crates, crowns, barbies, cogs, discarded glass and much more. He has a motto, “ I don’t pay more than five dollars or spend more than five hours on a piece.” Most of his material is found at garage sales, or dumpsters. Some materials are even gifted, like a giant motorized hypnotist’s wheel, which still runs. Richart also paints, and he uses his paintings as he would any other material. He binds them to other sculptures, or builds intricate frames to profile the painting.

The sculptures are bound together mainly with nail and wood, but there are many that are bound by tape or rope. Some are leveled with small stones wedged beneath them. He has created pathways that lead you through the yard, without direction; other than the way you choose to go or the way Richart leads you, but in every glance you are met with a new sculpture or a new painting.

Richart showed me a piece of a metal gate, which he had bound to planks of old wood with electrical tape, making a wall. He told me to look closely at the fencing. “Do you see the specks of black mold?” he asked. “Those specks are art!” he grabbed me and pulled me close to him. “This is what the gate used to look like,” he pointed to a freshly painted gate, “ but the gate has changed form.” He stood quickly with excitement. “I love that mold, I love watching my art change. I despise the idea of art being trapped in a museum. Let it be outside and mold. Let the weather do its course. Let it fade and chip away. These mold spots are art!” he paused and looked at the fence with his exuberant smile. “Oh, oh come look at this one.” I followed him, but while I walked I noticed mold growing on other strips of whitewashed metal. I noticed the green foam of a sliced swimming noodle fading and taking new form, I saw wood rotting away, and the nails holding them rusting. All of Richarts art was taking a natural course of change. “You see these. These are some of the only permanent sculptures in the yard. They are the king and queen.” They were resting in wooden seats, and constructed with old wood, Styrofoam and metal. “You see this! This! This is the king’s leg. It used to be up here, but one day the wood rotted away and it fell down. I don’t plan on putting it back with its nail. It’s supposed to be here now!”




I want my writing to explore vulnerable places where I am forced to change. I want it to constantly mold and influence my life, without ever settling or seeking a final shape. It’s a confrontation with fear. A fear of thinking things are not the way they are supposed to be. It’s a refusal to settle for a certain idea, theology, culture, etc. and a refusal to seek a set answer. There is no need for an ultimate answer; there is only need for movement.

"The Am"

a home
erupts
in marching flames

left naked and cold
shivering in the dark


Alone


but
in a request
for the silence of a
river

smoke
rolls
gently
in the distance


Rising.

Richart gives every one of his visitors a tassel. He asks every spectator to hang the tassel somewhere when he is not looking. “Oh I just get so surprised when I find them” he explained, “It’s a great game. Whenever I find them, I drop my tools, and I stop talking, then I bring the tassel back to its rack. It’s important to stop working. Sometimes I forget to look at my own art, it reminds me to appreciate it. Oh its so beautiful!” He stared at a giant carved Styrofoam block for a few moments then continued. “I just want people to participate with my art, not just look at it. Some people are nice and hang them where I can easily get them. Other people are naughty and hang them from the highest beams. Naughty or nice, high or low. It doesn’t make a difference to me. Oh! Oh come look at this. You see that, someone hung one all the way up there! It took me days to find that one!”

This process that Richart undertakes is praxis. He assembles the needed material for a piece (theory, or in this case material), and then erects a sculpture (action), only to reflect and consider it with the finding of a tassel (reflection). He allows spectators to highlight his art by placing tassels on pieces that stood out to them. Whether the piece resonated with the spectator, or they critique it, Richart appreciates their involvement. Richart finds these tassels and reflects on other’s observations, not caring what they think, but only what put an impression on them. He is not creating supremacy with his art, but he takes ownership and accountability for it, while also releasing it to the public for free, so that they can interpret and respond to it without an authoritative motive. He changes it in response to these tassels, but only because he has reflected on it. Not because someone outside of himself has told him to. He also allows his art to change naturally. He puts his art in a vulnerable environment: outside. The art undergoes a natural path of change because of its exposure to the natural world. He understands that he has no control over his art, and he does not try to evade that by protecting his sculptures in a gallery.

How as writers can we attain praxis? What environment or audience would enable our writing to change and grow? Writing is a crafted expression of truth. It’s like what Nietzsche said, “Truth is a mobile army of metaphors.” I work to create an army that is not authoritative, an army that is not defending or projecting an ultimate answer, but instead releasing a malleable truth. I want an army that is, what David Whyte wrote, “prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you.”

“Self-Portrait” By: David Whyte
It doesn’t interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.

I have been told, in that fierce embrace, even
The gods speak of God.

How as writers can we release our writing to nature and allow it to change and grow? I feel a need to release my ideas into a vulnerable setting, where they are open for interpretation. The written language can be dangerously permanent. It is a constant reference for an audience and can freeze its character, author, or idea into time. If our characters are frozen, their counsel becomes too easily prescribed. It creates a stagnant relationship to the world where everything can be named.

Joan Didion, with her journalistic talent in The White Album, gives an effective portrayal of our world being stuck in the parentheses. She illustrates life in the sixties, from revolutionary groups to Nancy Reagan, the water works of California, to highway monitoring systems, and effectively illuminates the problem of humans submitting to an idea or rhetoric. They follow ideas that have been verified, and then absorb them. When following a rhetoric or idea, it is impossible to live genuinely, because you suppress your personal feelings in the act of following an established path. Is the suppression of feeling a desperate grasp to assure that we are not alone? Joan Didion uncovers that there is no ultimate truth or answer, and there is no use in seeking an authoritative idea to follow.
So what do we do?

Curtis White, in his book Monstrous Possibility An Invitation to Literary Politics, offers a very compelling solution. He says, “I think we are really in a very fortunate and important position. As artists, people for whom literature was never only ideology but also praxis, we’re in a position to be able to argue that the creation and the critical study of literature should remain at the heart of what departments of English are about, but not for the usual reasons of The Great Tradition, but because the study of the literature of the past and the production of the literature of the future requires two things fundamental to a human sociality: a critical awareness of where we are and how we’ve gotten to where we are, and the creation of our own future. This is what writer’s and poets have always done: engage the tradition within which they work, and then change it. Each new work of fiction or poetry is the presentation of a world within we might choose to live.”

“Oh, oh come in here with me.” Richart led us into a small room with walls made completely out of glass. The glass was the kind you put in your shower, so you cannot see through it, you can only see an outline of what’s beyond it. Inside this room, he had wires hanging from the ceiling. Attached to the wires were brightly colored plastic balls. This color was surprising, because almost everything in Richart’s yard is painted white. “You see, I don’t like color, its too telling. Too easy. But come look at this! Come in here! You see, this glass. You can’t see through it. That’s why they use it in showers, you know? You see you wouldn’t want to put your butt up against the glass though, because then you can see it as clear as day! You see?” He pressed a colored ball from outside against the window, making it much more clear. “Will you step outside for me?” He directed us to the other side of the glass. “Oh you look so beautiful!”

I was moved by Richart’s enthusiasm of the shower doors, and I enquired further into them in a later visit.
“Well, those are shower doors, and if your behind a shower door, you become distorted, so you can be naked in the shower and people can be in the room with you and still not see your nakedness. And that’s kinda neat. I’m so closed to you, I can almost smell you, but I can’t see you. And all you’re concerned about is that I see you. The smell, you would smell me as if I was out, and uh, touch, well that eliminates touching. You can’t, you know – there’s no way your going to get to me, but you can’t see me clearly, and that’s all I’m concerned about.”

“You don’t like it so obvious?” I asked.

“That’s right. Yes.”

“I know you talk about Picasso, and other artists who are more abstract”

“Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah you really can’t see the people, but you see em better than you’d seen em, if you saw em currently.”

“So you like it to be less easy to grasp, but it gives you a presence?”

“Exactly.”

“What do you like about that?”

“Because it’s another way of seeing. Everything we see, uh, everything that goes by here on Harrison, is- everybody sees it that way. They see it like it’s a car. They don’t see the car is blurry. If they see the blurries, there not supposed to be out there on the car driving anyway, but there’s an interesting part about, that seeing things through a prism, or through colored glasses. That’s an interesting way to look at the yard, its just different. I like to be different. I’m eccentric. I’m very eccentric.”

“You showed me some of your arts deterioration processes-”

“Yes you’re very observing. Thank you.”

“Everything I’ve done,
which I like to do,
and I’m a work-a-holic,
and an eccentric,
but nature comes in
sunlight, wind and rain
and works everything over
and changes it
and always changes it for the better
and it makes me mad,
inside and outside,
because I made it.
I want credit,
but half of the credit goes
because it’s aged
and its weathered
and it has on a life all on its own.
So when I go around looking
I enjoy my own self,
because I see myself
through other glasses.
I see myself through the shower doors.
I don’t see myself clearly,
but I see myself better.”

“I’m better at my artwork, than I am at my interviews. I’m better at my artwork, than I am complying to your set of standards in Centralia. What you want me to be, everybody else is, everybody else is in line. How come I’m not in line? I don’t like to be in line. I don’t want to be in the line. I don’t wanna be like you. If I wanted to be like you, I would have it all gone. When I die, I want to be like you. I want to be dead. I want this stuff to be gone, and I wanna be the one that did it.”




It is simple to find words for what’s happening in the world, but these words are explaining what people or things do, not who or what they are. In some ways, this explanation is dehumanizing. We refer to people as characters or numbers, homogenizing them, and ignoring the unique and complex elements that they are composed of. We desperately seek for answers, without any reference of an origin.

We are in an age of information. The validity of stories is undermined because of its lack of facts. The folktale’s moral is not enough. It should have more clarity, accessibility, and it goddamn, sure as hell should be concise. The industrial revolution infested our society with convenience. We can find the history of our world on wikipedia. Who needs stories or poetry? But within this convenient, at our fingertips, access to the world, where is our reflection? Is change only based on technological advancement or political promises? Do we have anytime to bring the tassel back to its hook, or are we too distracted by the newest I-Pod? Are all of our emotions and ideas repetitive? Unimportant? Is their relevance taken away by our whole lives being expounded? In many ways, this information-based world we live in has shattered Richart’s glass, making the colorful plastic balls, nothing but colorful plastic balls.

It is the responsibility of writers to reclaim the importance of storytelling, to write with the simple initiative to profile the beautiful human being as an ever-changing entity. To free ourselves from information. We are more than just statistics, and we deserve a story filled with beautiful complexities. “Our word is our weapon,” as the Zapatistas would say.

But the way we tell these stories is vital. How can we write without permanence and authority? How can we allow our stories to be up for interpretation? I have found that the only way to write without authority is to inquire into our own convoluted lives.
In the inquiry of self, there is a constant encountering of things too enormous to comprehend. Writing is a brushing up against these things: a process of seeing through the shower doors. Calasso explains this as brushing against woolen ties, in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. He says, “ ‘The woolen ties are so called because they bind.’ But what was this bond? It was the momentary surfacing of a link in that invisible net, which engulfs the world, which descends from heaven to earth, binding the two together and swaying in the breeze. Men wouldn’t be able to bear seeing that net in its entirety all the time: they would get caught in it at once and suffocate.” The explanation of this encounter is unimportant; the importance is the exploration of the impression it leaves on you. That impression cannot be dogmatic. There are lessons and knowledge to be found inside of it, but nothing to be preached. I work to write words I can reflect on and move from. Within this movement, there is a constant shedding. You douse yourself in words and images, only to scrub them away and start over. Obviously, themes begin to form and there is a bleak silhouette of truth, but I have found that truth changes as well. Truth is uncontrollable and unnamable. It is not reality; in fact it is the defiance of reality. To process truth as you would process information would destroy you. This is why I write. It is an expression. A releasing of what eats me inside. It’s vomiting: a meditated projection of an inquiry with no answer.

"No Words"

It’s that feeling
That finds shelter in your gut
Squeezing and twisting.
A pushing up
Into your throat
Or your eyes.

It’s that enormous collision
The one that shatters your bones.
It’s when you have to explain yourself:

I am the idea.
I am the rhetoric.
I am not alone.

That deep rooted tree
toes frigid
clenching the frosted soil below.

A harsh wind bites
the deep brown oak
broken out of the frozen ground.

How far do its roots reach?

Toes ache
skyward
into the stretched branches

fingers close
a fallen leaf’s
tender body
crumbling with a gasp.




Emerson once said, “All words were once animals.” If all words were once animals, our words in some senses kill its subject. In our explanations of the living world, we disallow our subject to change, because we freeze it in our description. Nothing is new or unique because our words meaning have already been given to us. How then, do we inquire into ourselves? If all of our movements and emotions are named, how do we move without being given a social prescription? It seems like a never-ending deconstruction of our descriptions and explanations is necessary.

Curtis White, in Monstrous Possibility, illustrates a rebirth of language through “the monstrousness” of postmodern literature. He says, “the monstrousness of postmodernism’s literary possibilities is the result, on the one hand, of the debunking or deconstructing of certain central conventions of the nineteenth-century literary realism, especially of the notions of mimesis and genre, and, on the other hand, of the willingness to allow narrative’s newly released parts to float, mingle and recohere. The realist values the reassurance of the familiar; the excitable postmodernist - a curious bricoleur – values the beauty of the new and monstruous. As Qfwfq would say, ‘the barrier between monsters and nonmonsters is exploded and everything is possible again.’”

If our use of language freezes its subject, we are no longer influenced by its monstrous capabilities. Our words lose meaning and our perception of the world becomes dull and exhausted. We become the inhabitants of a recycled world lacking ingenuity. But if we deconstruct our world, rejecting its furnished explanations, it might open up into expansive possibilities.

Richart decided to show us one last thing. He led us out of his yard to his garage. In front of his garage was a giant hypnosis wheel. It was attached to a frame and the wheel spun with the power of a small motor. “It works, you see!” Richart celebrated as he started the motor. The black spirals started to spin, at first slow, but gradually spun faster and faster, making a hazy web of black and white. “Do you see it?” Richart whispered. I didn’t know what he meant, but was confident that he would explain. “Do you see the color?” The color, I thought, it’s a black and white wheel. But as I stared more intently at the wheel, I noticed a pink tint. “You see it! Oh it’s a beauty! You put black and white in motion and you get color! Oh! When I was gifted this machine, the man showed me this, and well, I thought he was mad, but when I saw that color, I went ahead and gave that man a big hug!” He turned the motor off at that and bid us a farewell, returning to his work.