Letters to Samantha
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Dear Samantha, It is the wee hours of the morning. I am still engrossed in the preparation for Georgia. As Anne says, “This reminds me of when you prepared for your first teaching job in Wisconsin but worse.” I guess that is how I have always approached a challenge: prepare, then prepare, and then over-prepare. Luck comes to those who are prepared I have always thought. Some things like art have come easily to me but the rest has been just that I work harder than the next person with the use of my talents. I always, when I can, plan on my own playing field with my own rules. I do believe that first you shoot the arrows and then paint the target. You have seen me concerned. You have seen the failures that I turn into success. Therefore you have always been suspicious of the admirers who think that things just come to me easily. It is these wee hour sessions that only you, Anne and a few close friends know about me. The one thing that I do have is a thirst for “doing a job right”. And I define my own right, although I certainly research what others have done before me. I expect to stand above the crowd and many times I do. Many times I do not but that is not publicly known. They only see the successes. They do not see the eighty times out to ask for money and get the big “NO”. All they see is the few times when the answer is “YES”. Of course, I control the flow of publicity so all I broadcast is the successes. My confidence is something that I wear to shield the knowledge that if you risk failure is more likely than success. I used to place you as a small child on a mantle piece, standing high above the world, and ask you to fly into my arms. You trusted me to catch you and would howl with joy when I did. I watch you with Erin and see you doing the same thing. We learn to be confident because at some time in our life someone has challenged us to fly and been there to catch us when we fall. I had my parents who believed, or let me believe, that I could do anything, try anything, succeed at anything, although they were not risk takers in so many aspects of their life. Never changed neighborhoods. Never changed jobs. Never expanded their ideas about the world. But my dad was a gambler. My mother a dreamer of big things which she never tried. I know that Jay understands that in his dad but he never knew the tenderness, the absolute love of a mother who saw everything that you do as a wonder and a joy. Jay learned to survive without it but you had both also. It is a richer beginning, a luckier beginning. How you end though is up to each of us. I think of this now as I prepare to go to Tbilisi, Georgia. I have no idea what I will find but I know that no one could have prepared better, taking into account the skills that they have. It was not enough to just go and teach. I wanted to leave something that was American: a collection of all that I honor in this country. I am a patriot. I believe in the American dream that starts with individual and collective freedom, mixed with a sense of spirituality (not organized religion), and a believe in the “manifest destiny” of this country. Just think, everyone (even the native American Indians) come from someplace else. The Indians came across the straits between Russia and Alaska. The Northwest Indians call it “the rainbow bridge”. We all came from someplace else. Seven out of every ten persons has relatives do came through Ellis Island in New York, the rest from someplace else. We are all newcomers. I think that adds to the idea that we can do anything as Americans. We have to be wary of overdoing it. We must stop trying to solve the world’s problems with our “manifest of freedom”, our “manifest destiny”. If what we got is great, which it is, then do it and the world will copy or not. Our strength is that we are free to think anything, do anything, achieve anything. The American success story is written with sweat and a sense of freedom. This is a hard country to find your own place. What we did with the Indians is as bad as what the Nazis did to the Jews. We should never throw the first stone at a transgressor. That is true on a global scale as well as a personal one. We have two new neighbors, women, and some people around here are asking what is going on since there is only one boyfriend who lives with them. Anne and I both said, only at the same moment, “Who cares?” They don’t come into our bedroom; we will not go into theirs (even in our thinking). Robert Frost was right when he wrote, “Good fences make good neighbors.” We should rejoice in our community but leave each person alone (as long as they do not interfere with our freedom) to find their own solutions to the journey of living. America has always had the space to leave others alone but maybe that is changing. America’s love of space in its art and democracy has been fundamental to our system. Freedom is having the space to think, dream and live. I hope that never changes, even when the space is pushed in and we are more “boxed” than now. Anne and I enjoyed seeing where you work, your working space. There is a wonderful sense of community there. It is obvious that somethings you share and some are no one’s business. When we left, I turned right on the beltway and got almost out to where you live. At that point, we knew that we were lost. We called our friends and ask for directions again. They live where you used to live (just off Northwest Highway). Somehow, I had it in my mind that they lived further out (the space that I created in my mind was not what was the reality). It did not hamper the day: we had lunch (a unique salad), talked of our art, went to see her painting exhibit at The Art Centre in Plano, went back to their home, had dessert, and drove to Waco, our home. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, we both said (again almost at the same time), “There is no place like home.” There is a space that we call “home”, even as we change houses, neighborhoods, cities, jobs, etc. I have always carried two picture windows in my mind’s eye for my studio, “my working home”. Even now, in a smaller place, since we do not need the space to live with you and Chris finding your own homes, your own space, I have a picture window in my mind for where I work. It is even larger than the two windows of the past. It is a global window. Maybe that is why I applied for the position in Tbilisi. Here was a neighborhood that I could not see from my mind’s eye window and I wanted to explore it with my art, our travels. Here was a neighbor that I had not met. It is funny but with email, every place is closer in the world. I think nothing today of sending off a message to someone who is ten hours different in their routines. I think nothing of talking to my neighbor halfway across this globe. Columbus may have had a different attitude toward the Indians if he had email with them before stepping on his ship. Just look at the makeup of Captain Kirk’s crew on the Enterprise: blacks, Orientals, whites, Vulcans, etc. It was all possible because of communication and travel. “Beam me up, Scottie” is the cry of all of us as we age. Death is Shakespeare’s undiscovered country. I have written you so many times about my belief in the separation of the spirit and the body that it is now old hat but it is even more true as I grow old. The spirit inside is the adventurer who thinks that anything is possible if the mind sees it, the hand and feet do it. The outside, the body, is a different story. Just like your car which needs a new transmission, the body grows old and needs major repairs. I truly believe those who seem young even when inhabiting this aging body are those whose spirit is alive and young. Picasso said that he was “thirty going on 89” when he reached older ages. Martha Graham, the great dancer, said “She was only in competition with that person she knew she could become”. That is not the statement of age. Wisdom through time, yes, but not aging. That is where I find myself. I am as young as Erin at two when I play with her. I am younger than my students when I teach them. Their minds are boxed, mine is free. Therefore what can I take to Tbilisi, Georgia on my Fulbright Scholar grant. I will take my ideas about spirit: my own and the collective American spirit that shaped mine. I will talk of freedom as a main course, not some dessert at the end of a meal of living. I will share my insights and learn new ones from them. I will be a sponge, soaking up the culture and bringing it out again in my creative work. My art has never been “abstract” in the sense that it outside this world. It is taking many aspects of living and putting them together in new (to me) way. Each time that I think that something I see is knew, I find that it is new packaging but the message is old. It is about the world. A landscape that looks at the world with feet firmly planted on the ground because flightscape for me when I fly but each is a way that my eye sees the earth or the sky. The ingredients do not change: me, my mind’s eye, the eartch, the air, the sky and the spirit in each. I cut up the world. I break it up so that I can understand it better. But the message is as old as the strokes on the cave wall. Mankind trying to see his/her world. We change positions, viewpoints, but the ingredients are the same. Someone sees an apple; I see quantum foam (the space between atoms), painted in the colors of the apple. Someone sees a volcano erupting in nature’s violent majesty and I cut it into strips so that the action is left but not the “noun” of the subject. I see active verbs and adjectives and I paint them. It is what Erin sees as she explores her new world. Every artist is Columbus setting off to find the “new world”. The difference is that I can now send emails and search the Internet of my mind to talk to those who I have not met yet. Love is an email to others. Loving you is not a condition of parenthood. It is a fact of existence. The spirit of that love will live as long as you breathe and then as long as your children breathe and then as long as their children’s children and..... You get the idea. Love is a free spirit that is given without expecting anything in return but when it comes back it is even richer in spirit. “I love you” is not a phrase but a state of being. I cannot stop loving you even when this body stops its job of moving me around and taking me places. My love for Anne and Chris is different but as rich. My love for Anne is mixed with physical sharing where the spirit is unleashed in lovemaking. Isn’t that a wonderful word “love-making”? It is a creative act. It is to make something where something was not there before. You do not hang it on the wall at home or display it in exhibition halls but it is a work of art. You display it in your secret smile and the warmth that it brings inside to your spirit. My love for you is built upon respect and something else that I cannot name. It is seeing someone blossom as a flower and feel that you have nourished that growth. I have long ago stopped worrying whether you will have a spirit that will survive. You will always survive, strive and thrive. Therefore I love you. If you did not, as Chris does not at time, I would still love you.. He gives love without asking for anything in return. He understands love without understanding why. Therefore to end this letter, I say “I love you” and my spirit flies, your Dad. Joe |
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