More Fresh Hells & A Few Heavens
A way of staying alive in the present moment.
Dear Friends,
I continue my practice of writing back to posts on social media. Also its antidote: writing back to works of art served up at random. It’s a little like surfing, taking the waves as they come. It’s a little like dancing. It’s one way to reclaim my attention, one way to stay alive to the present.
As you can see, this practice has become a series of “Fresh Hells” and “Fresh Heavens,” the naming inspired by Dorothy Parker. When her phone rang or her doorbell sounded, she would look up and say, “What fresh hell is this?” It’s what I ask myself whenever I open the scroll.
— Sal
What Fresh Hell?
A Post on Overview
It is hard to escape, it is everywhere, it is eradicating. This is the dawn, and then the sun will rise and shine everywhere. Still, underneath the trees there will be shadows, and in the shadows maybe something unexpected will survive, and in the afternoon the shadows lengthen, and then evening comes, and then darkness. That’s how it is with metaphors, they go on past any answer and any wrong.
A Post on La Marseillaise
There’s no particular reason to post La Marseillaise, but someone does. All of our particular reasons are too many. It’s just one fictional night club in one fictional port city or it’s everywhere in every city. Tonight, a big moon is going to rise in the sky again, and people in many places will raise their eyes to look. A big moon, a red moon. Moons have risen over many empires and they have risen over lands of ordinary peace. Moon, I have been waiting for you by the shore and waiting for something to rise up.
A Post on the Senate Floor
The senators are upset, you can see it in their faces. I think back to Rome, as many men do every day. Oh, the senators. Oh, the knives. Oh the caesars that fell. But there are other caesars like two women seizing each other, like lifting bellies. One theater belies another, and lies and lies.
A Post on Walter De Maria
If the phone rings, it’s Walter, and he’d like to talk to you. The phone is on a wooden floor. It’s a regular old model, heavy black with a rotary dial and a spiraling cord. The handset could be in your hand. It’s a journey, someone says, of self-discovery. It’s one man and another. Both are imaginary, but one is long gone.
A Post on a Quetzal
He was soggy and resplendent. He was male in the late afternoon. You could be like this in garments of green and orange-red and white. You could be where it is raining. I am not where it is raining. My garments are black. I meet the possibility eye to eye. Between us are feathers.
A Post about Graves
They will be cleared away, they will make way. What is lost is loved, and what is new is not loved. Each dwelling of the dead has a beautiful roof and a place for offerings. The incense is like a transmission line, sending power to the invisible and returning the invisible to the present. Standing by one grave is a man whose sadness does not reach his face. It is everywhere in the body, in the landscape, in the reader.
What Fresh Heaven?
A Painting of a Mountain
I turn the mountain to make it larger, but nothing could make it more blue. It is blue, and blue, and blue again. Even the white is blue. And yes, I would go there. I would just be. Clouds part and there is nothing but volcano, steaming its warning. I am warned, but I have not moved away. Tell me where I am and where I’ve been—I can feel the years layering, one on the other like stories.
A Portrait of a Young Man
I’m seeing a time before all this happened. There is the past, and there is the past of the past. It’s that past of the past, when men and women rose to sing the hours and the great books were copied out by hand; in that past, I am not imagined. In the present of the past, the gaze is steady and meets my eyes. He is looking at someone who will not obey him, though he doesn’t know it. The painter, too, knows more than the subject, but the one who owned the painting kept it secret.
A Painting of a Mill
The place where the water enters is black, shaped like an open mouth, and above it are windows of surprised eyes, repeating across the building. Are we surprised by the intense red of the roof? Are we surprised by the netting of clouds across the sky? Or is it the swan, black in shadow and black in reflection? If these are the questions, then the answers are in the shapes of the trees, each species its own form. The grasses pretend not to have anything to say, but they nod and bend. Tell me, where did you want to go when you began looking? What did you want to forget?
A Painting of a Deity
Let me have many eyes. May I adorn myself with skulls. I hardly know who I am amid all this fire, but do not doubt that I hold you in my teeth. The kindness of the world is a white mule crossing a sea of blood. Just that: one wild eye and two upright ears. I rise like this out of dreams, into a green and turbulent world. Every hair is fire.
How are you dancing with the present moment?
Past Heavens & Hells
Further adventures and new ways of seeing can be found in my book, The Uses of Art.
Artist Sal Randolph’s THE USES OF ART is a memoir of transformative encounters with works of art, inviting readers into new methods of looking that are both liberating and emboldening.
Dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent.
— Michael Cunningham
A joyful, dazzling treasure-box of a book.
— Bonnie Friedman
Here’s a guide, to waking up, over and over again.
— Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara
These are fantastic and made my morning 🤍
the dawn, bright, then shadows, then darkness - and again and again - you bring light back - over and over... love your evocative ways!