ALLEGORIES OF ANALOG
I can only do the work I hum as I paint this painting. Make this sculpture. All I can do is write this poem. Let this be my hymn of humility The utterance of a humble worker bee The bumbling stutter of an utter stumblebum Who lets bee be finale of seem One roly poly if I paint each day On three by three foot burlap canvases, In thirty years ten thousand rise to planes six miles above: Regard, I’ve done the work. Trees do the work. They load and bless with fruit Their Selves, they rise, spread, swell and droop, wilt, rot. The trees are symbols of be for us beings of seeming. Yet they say nothing, as they are. All I can do is eat, says the caterpillar Is poop, says the interior earthworm. Short-circuiter of thought-for-food chains. Regardless, they have done the work. I can only do the work, says the thief And steals, says cuckoo and gifts her eggs In collective nests to unconscious broods. Regardless, they have done the work. I am who I am: Wiley Coyote And Wilhelm Schelling, coiner of Unconscious; Supreme Self depicter, my own best critic, I slay with throws of philosopher’s stones. All that’s left: Write this poem, paint burlap And bricks pink, pick oranges, laugh with my wife, And chat with friends about waves, and drift and slide On half boards Swamis inside left. That’s all.
Max Roemer presents “Allegories of Analog”,
new sculptures and paintings about doing the work.
If analog is the goal,
asks roly poly,
how far can you go?
This show is about doing the work. Showing the work is part of the work consisting of learning, making, sharing. The studio, the yard, virtuoso pizza and these lines are ways of sharing.
This show negates whether a tree makes a sound if no one hears it fall, or why make art if no one sees it, as there is not a tree that falls without me knowing and resounding it.
This show is part of my practice, my blistered-palm and bleeding-thumb reality of tree stumps that break toes and rocks that throw out backs. I am no maker, no crafter, no apprentice or master. My reality is in the making, in the making of things so analog that my only peer is gravity itself, the elemental gravity of rocks falling, tides dropping and trees felled.
So analog that blind mute gravity is my only peer, the gravity that never teaches but by doing, that never speaks but by its centripetal deeds, and only ever rests in the balance of my imagination’s centrifugal eccentricity; of my imagination who is the maker of the song and its ideas of order, of my figures from felled infested trees.
So analog is the making and its reality, it is mere making friends of things, of stone and wood, merely influencing things, free from insidious manipulation and manufacture. It is the basest of materialism, apprenticed to the happenstance of where things fall and crush toes.
The Rock As Reality
I take the rock: I hold you as reality, not as a symbol but the thing, and what were you, and earth, and stars, and sea, if to the human mind’s imaginings silence and solitude were vacancy?
To me it’s a ministry of sorts, the work I do. Not purposed to a finished product but meant as a service, not to puff me up but to humble me to the slow drip work of dew that conspires with gravity to drop from the roof and fill the pot on my patio as an open hourglass, an hourglass of
seasons; It’s all very devoid of irony.
To others my acts may lack intent or effect, both self-indulging and divulging, and evoke mild-mannered bemusement or mockery. Already at crack of dawn, they greet me as I sit cross-legged and sip coffee and dew drips, mocking caws of crows from crowns of trees.
I do as I do. I do as rain falls. Or as trees fall. Or weeds grow. I do with the inevitability of gravity. As life lives on for its own sake, the crows and the weeds and the roly poly, needing no reason for being, so have I no reason for doing what I do. And in spite or in view of all these, I do and I do and I do. Undeviating. Drip. Drap. Drop.
We sit in the rocks at Swamis like pebbles washed ashore. Rolling, frolicking back and forth and up and down, from water to land, from sand to sea. That’s where the balance lies, in to-and-fro play, the whole equation’s equanimity. My work is play, it’s the gravest of plays and I play with the levity of stones.
I can’t go on. I
will go on, says the roly
poly and goes on.