The content of our own imaginations, populated by stories, images and memories, is particular and unique to each of us (I suppose that there are some archetypes across some cultures, including California gay culture which I will examine). That's just what's so. But for many of us when we first sit down and concentrate on the breath, the terrain is familiar but the vehicle is clumsy and unpredictable-once we learn to stay relatively still and can endure the pain in their knees, and stay awake. Perhaps boredom also sets in as stories and associated phantasms begin to loop.
Internal, mental conversations, supported by lots of mental apparatus and for the most part unrecognized, may be the first things that appear in meditation, if you have the luck to skip over that lyric on the car radio that won't go away. But they are also the stuff of mediation, the road that leads us deep into ourselves.
Because interior monologues, by their nature, hide themselves, for the most part we remain blind to their influence. They govern a large portion of our lives. When some enter the cultural conversation and are accepted as "the Truth" without close scrutiny, they assume a powerful, almost secret power to determine the choices and futures of a many people. (I would say the most of the current conversation about gay marriage falls into this category which is why I am so committed to make sure that this right is open to people of all sexual orientations). The following pages are an exploration of parts of my own journey to understand and decipher the interior code of my own mind.
But you might, at some point, get lucky (some say unlucky) enough to understand deeply that you yourself, no one else, sustain these conversations and images that flow through your mind.
The Images
It was over a period of 10 months in 1998 that I made these collages. I was working with a group of 70 people who were taking a course called Partnership with Landmark Education. We examined the hidden and not so hidden conversations that govern our lives. I began with found images which I assembled and pasted on a page in the moment to represent my inner conversations. Simple cut and paste changed almost immediately as I began to paint on the found images, sometimes covering most of the page with my own hand.
I had been in art school more than 25 years prior, but had abandoned that painting and design as I began to invent my life as a gay man in San Francisco. The recovery of my art gave me the chance of really inhabiting that life.
What follows are more than 50 of those pieces. I present most of them with my original notes plus my further reflections which bubbled up as I assembled these pages. If they stir up something in you, I welcome your thoughts and reflections.
The painting that is the cover piece for the whole website came from a collage I did after Valerie Bianquis told me the story of a cherished family guitar lost and then almost miraculously recovered 12 hours later on the steps of her brother's flat in Paris. This guitar began to appear my own dreams, perhaps because I had traveled the road from Paris to Normandy myself many years ago. Then I began to recover my deep sense that nothing of value is really ever lost, and I renewed my faith in the power of the universe to care for us.