Last Night Kept Dreaming of Creation emerging among War Torn & Bloodied Walls

For decades i have gone though periods of intense dreaming of words, letters, forms and colors on walls, walls in ruin for the most part, crumbling walls, the walls of interiors of abaondoned houses lived in, of side walls of bombed out seeming buildings in cities in many countries, and glorious walls also, simply old and covered with peeling layers of paints and signs running altogether to form completely new languages.

Since I worked for some years as a house painter this makes sense t one level, but at another, a lifelong inspiration of mine is the fictional painter Gulley Jimson in the book The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary. (It was made into a film starring Alec Guinness as Gulley.) Gulley, whose earlier works are regarded as great, has grown old and homeless, dreaming of walls he is going to paint, his new style of painting rejected except by the young. Visionary, spouting Blake to himself and others, Gulley watches for every opportunity to beg, borrow and steal his way to paints, brushes and--walls. Even walls that will be destroyed--as long as he can paint on them first.

Working as a house painter, living in abandoned buildings, walking around cities observing sites/sights/cites undergoing disintegration and demolition, one realizes that Walls are impermanent. Huge walls are being built al the time to Wall In and Wall Out--as well as all the walls around the world, small walls of homes and schools, hospitals, stores, bombed and blasted and bulldozed into oblivion. The Big Walls live on the blood of the small walls, they grow fatter and taller with the flesh of the small walls and their fragments, their dust. Yet someday they will grow so obscene they will explode . . . come crashing down--

The painter painting on the Walls and walls brings a vision of the dissolution of these bloody obscenities--these Walls which eat alive humans, fields, trees, drink up waters and blood, suck the brains and eyes out of the skull and crush the fingers and toes--

In these dreams the coming of paint and letterings and forms, colors, emerging among burnings, blastings, blood--is the energy and refusal, the resistance of Creation to the Internment Walls of Death--