windthread

345

Sun shown down on the Cloth this morning.  yes.  it's finished.  it's right.

 

a white light hovered (top left) and i couldn't determine  the source

 

and the Next Cloth began talking....i love it already and it's hardly there.

 

it was hard, waiting till 2 o'clock,  which  is the earliest i could give the Goats their afternoon pellets without setting unrealistic precedence.   and they brought the HalfTon bale of alfalfa at 1:oclock on the dot as agreed and i got it covered with a tarp,  even tarp tied down well so when the Goats are inside at night they don't have to stare at a half ton of food all night and not be able to have a leaf of it.  so all that and even more time left to wait.

i have been gifted with India Flint's latest book,  Stuff, Steep, and Store.  it sits on the Morning table and i look at it several times a day.  and as i was passing the Coral Berry Bush on my way in

 

i thought...Why Not?  so....

 

there's no cloth in it here...just the dry leaves and berries.  tomorrow i'll wrap some cloth.  but this is Enough, almost really....a jar of shining Beauty of the ledge...  then...it was Time.

 

Nothing fancy.  The place is an old, many years unused, stockyard.  it's where ranchers from all around would have brought their free range cattle to fatten them  up and sell  at auction.  i don't know any more of it's history, but i will find out, soon enough.  

nothing romantic.

 

 

 

 

about the Place and also, maybe about the Woman.   the Zebra,  who she acquired because he was deemed Untrainable by two expert trainers,  was being asked here,  to do the Hokey Pokey.  he likes learning things.  so, it was ...put your left foot out, put your left foot in,  put your left foot out and shake it all about, do the Hokey Pokey and turn yourself about...   Sundays are Big visiting days and he had already been hand fed several times and really...wasn't into the Hokey Pokey in its entirety,  he only agreed to the turn yourself about part.  but he skipped the parts he didn't want to do and it all was just Ok.

and then...lots of brown horses.

 

this was the one i loved.  the colour above his nostrils looked like the Sunset.  he has an eye infection.

 

 

 

there were two buckskins.  but somehow, i didn't take their pics.  they are beautiful.  but it was the brown horses that caught my heart.  just the Regular brown ones.

i will need a little bit of time to absorb what i Felt.  horses.  horses. 

but in the midst of it all, i told about the Goats here and they will come on Wednesday.  maybe early in the morning.  but, Wednesday.  and she will work with one of the Goats.  she says that all the Goats,  All of the Goats will be wanting this.  She will work with one.  and show me how.  and all of them will be wanting to offer up their hooves.  AND

she said..

we'll make a video, ok?  ..................................eeeeee  a video....................for Utube! ....yes!!!!

and OK!

344

20 days left of the 365.   365 days.  One Year.    I went to see Alz B today, came home and  made a diagram to take with me tomorrow to the Mustang Camp.

 

to make it easier to tell her what i want her to know,  so i can ask questions clearly.  and i found out that this is the Winter Camp.  soon they will be returning to Northern New Mex....to Rio Arriba for the warm months.  no time to lose.

and i was thinking.   how everything will Shift soon into those warm months.  everything will take on different energy.  What is happening OutSide will become Primary.  Winter Camp.  Summer Camp.

and continuously in my mind,  since Maria, or she who sometimes is known as  2,  told me about  Friedensreich Hundertwasser,  and Austrian man,  an artist,  a Thinker,  his primary Ground of the 5 skins

 

 

you can Google  www.hundertwasser.com/skin  or click here, IF I REALLY DID ACCOMPLISH A LINK?????????????????????????????  WHICH WOULD BE THANKS TO MO'S man, Old Man  Crow?????  i might have DONE it?????????????????????????????????

but the 5 skins.  this has taken seed in my mind.  how it is true.  it's all skin.  just as the kind i see on these hands.  

i took away the "caligraphic notes"  as Dana referred to them, which i loved,  thinking of them as caligraphic notes,  but i took them away.  they did not belong there.  but might on some other cloth soon.  i need to reduce their lines even more.  thinking about that too

 

 

343

a good good day.

 

the Cloth led the day.  "this.  this.  this."  and i did these.  it is Good.  very very good.  not finished, but no more to add.  just finish what was asked for today.  ok.

and got a load of grass hay,  cleared the way for it,  and got, on loan, amazingly, the book that the Mustang woman has written.  in the very beginning there is this.

"Study the species of animal you plan to train.  Find an ethogram (list of typical behaviors) and try to create a catalog of photos of your animal doing species-typical behaviors.  If you can't find a prepared ethogram, make your own by developing a list of behaviors and a description of what you actually see when the animal is doing them (try to avoid speculating about why).

Find  video clips of this species both in the wild and interacting with humans, and then scrutinize them for typical behaviors.  Take notes and become fluent talking about your species.  The more you know about your animal's species, the less you are going to have to reinvent the wheel.

Nature has endowed your animal with a rich evolutionary history behind it's behavioral repertoire.  Use it, if you can.  Going against Mother Nature is the hard road.

ZEBRA Threat Behavior Ethogram                                                                                                                                        Kick threat:                                                                                                                                                                                       Presents rump while swishing tail, while facing away.  lifts a hind hoof one or more times, then             continues turning to face threat.                                                                                                                                          Bite threat:                                                                                                                                                                                       Puts ears back against neck, flips lips, exposing teeth, swishing tail with force.

The emotional states of many animals are easily recognizable.  Their faces, their eyes, and the ways in which they carry themselves can be used to make strong inferences about what they are feeling.  Changes in muscle tone, posture, gait, facial expression, eye size and gaze, vocalizations, and odors, singly and together indicate emotional responses to certain situations.  What does this type of animal look like when it is relaxed?  What does it look like when it is afraid?  What do they do when they panic?  Try noticing fine details.

You especially need to know what your animal is likely to do when it is uncomfortable, about to make a run for it, or about to attack you.  Imagine that you are training a pig and it is standing with its head low and swinging side to side.  What is going to happen next?  You could be bitten if you don't figure it out quickly!"

    

 

342

odd day.  woke to a White World.  it had snowed overnight.  that was unexpected.   and i spent some time feeling the feeling of unexpected snow.  how it totally changes my whole metabolism it seems.  and then i went out and swept the wood pile so the snow wouldn't seep into the wood to any significant degree.  

came in and did such small things with the Cloth...small.  really small.  moving one single strand,  moving it back, over and over.   Looking.  Seeing how if the end of a strand turns up or down or goes straight, how it changes everything.  i did this until i couldn't anymore and i went outside.  the snow had melted to vanished by early afternoon.  i went out and simply sat with the Goats.  Front Goats, back Goats.  i  worked to see myself from outside myself to see myself as in that Diorama.  the Goats came and went from me.  they were in a mood too.  Snowbunny, Onday, Magic and Mercy would go in and out of their shelter back there.  go lay a while, chew their cuds.  come back out mill around.  Mercy took up her dove stalking behavior for a while.  Just Going got interested in it and didn't stalk, but was attentive.    i studied the scrap feed that is inches deep in the Front pen.  does it help or hinder the situation of moisture on the earth.   i think it's a buffer.  but maybe not.

Came in and went directly to the scrap basket rooting around for the "coyote" cloth.  a scrap of that and added it to the Cloth.  

 

and i moved one other scrap to the other side.  Suddenly, everything is different.  it's ummmm,  thicker.  way more substantial,  no longer a dance,  or if it is a dance, there is now drumming.  it's intense.   so i spent the rest of the afternoon trying to take that coyote cloth away,  trying to go back to how it was.  moving,  and by moving, i mean just the slightest fraction of movement, right or left, curved here and not there....all afternoon.  all afternoon.  i feel like i had done some very intensive physical work.  interesting.  i wonder what's going on.

 

341 Part Two

so...no new news here.   it's been there for a long time,  since it happened.  we've known all we cared to know.  if you are interested in more about the illusion,  there is Derrick Jensen's book  The Culture of Make Believe.  

 

as you can see.  it's a big fat book.  hard reading in a way,  but such a relief in another.

so.  yes.  Why this article got put here is because of the

Serendipity

Synchronicity

CO incidence

Magic even maybe?   Signs.   Signs are always  flashing, blinking like fireflies.  sometimes we notice.  and since i have had this feeling of something ....NEXT....just around the corner,  i am watching, all slitty eyed...holding my breath.   and this morning,  i am doing the New York Times ritual where i go through the old papers from my friend that she gives me.  setting aside the Arts Sections and Food Sections to read before using to start the morning fire.  and i see this picture in the Arts section but pass it over without much notice and go on through the rest of that section but then for whatever reason i go back.  and begin to read.  

What was lost.  what was deemed inconsequential to the forging of the american dream.  

and what's interesting to me is that this comes in the days just before i go to visit the Mustang Camp on Sunday.  My Biggest and First question to this woman would be....WHY?  Why do wild horses need to be rounded up and "adopted"????  WHY is the Bureau of Land Management....land MANAGEMENT feeling they need to do this?  There may be good reason.  i don't know.  that's for Sunday.  but for today,  i am wondering about wild and tame.  about UNdomesticated and Domesticated.

i am interested in Goats which i see/feel as somewhere inbetween.  they fall completely in neither category.   I am really not so immediately interested in horses.  i love horses.  they make me cry.  they are so Willing and Easy.  like i was as a young girl for boys.  i wanted the connection.  like they seem to be so willing for.    i had a horse.  actually two of them.  my horse was the first thing i bought after a broken down car when i was 19 years old.  all my life i'd wanted a horse.  well,  all my more grown years.  when i was a little girl,  i wanted to BE a horse.  in probably second grade we were supposed to write a "story" about what we wanted to be when we grew up.  we had that fat lined paper to write it on.  the blunt fat leaded pencils.  and as i have told you before,  i had spent many many days up in my childhood attic looking at the pictures in National Geographic.  the Issues that were about the SouthWest.  and when i learned to read, in First Grade,  i not only looked at the pictures, but i read words and looked those words up in the Dictionary.  Obsidian.   so,  i wrote for that assignment that i wanted to be a Wild Stallion,  shining obsidian black.  i plagerized those words, shining obsidian black from an article i'd read up in the attic.  and i went on for a few lines about running the mesas...which today i refer to as the Rim.    so...we are circling Way Way back here if we follow the flashing blinking lights of Signs.  Circling way way around.  

the horses i know best in my immediate life are Alz B's daughter-in-law Nelia's horses.  she has four.  She is a lifelong horsewoman.  and to this day,  has a trainer come every week.  they go round and round in the arena there...she on the horse...the trainer calling out to her.  i've watched this.  she trains for Dressage.  English.  It's all quite beautiful.  this woman and her horses.  really.  but something in me is also very uneasy with it.  Why?  i keep asking self.  Why? 

and what's arisen recently when i think about the domestication of these Goats...a few of which DO NOT want to be touched,  is the Old Cowboy's dog Rosie.  he had decided a few weeks ago that she needed to "go".  She was old.  and she was.  very old for a Chow.  and she had begun peeing on the floor, not wanting to go outside in the cold.  so there was Angst and back and forth and he finally decided to get her "put down".  Rosie had been his constant companion for maybe we think 17 years.  she never went anywhere in those 17 years.  his house, his yard.  Rosie.  she was never trained to walk on a leash even.  (my fault?)   she followed him constantly.  from the hallway near the bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen table back to the chair in the living room, the hallway to the bathroom, the kitchen table, the hallway to the bedroom.  her Work in life.  and when he decided to have her put down,  the guy came and had to DRAG her.  Literally DRAG her out to load in his truck because she had never learned to walk on a leash.  

so.  is it a good idea?, to learn to walk on a leash?  would it be a good idea for these Goats?

and as i've watched the Utube video's there is an added factor.  i remember Way Back a workshop that a woman taught about one's work place.  about Power Over versus Power With.

how does this come into play?

 

and i've finished the Kantha.   things in the middle got into some disarray.  will need to look there a lot and re~do.  but i see that this is about also some kind of Wildness...some kind of need FOR a sense of .......uhhhhh.....non compliance maybe?   i don't know.  i really don't know yet.  waiting.

 

 

 

 

341 Part One

 

the article:

Around 1905, the city fathers of Denver decided that a monmument to honor their pioneering predecessors was in order.  The commission went to Frederick William MacMonnies, an American sculptor trained in the Beaux-Arts who lived in France.  MacMonnies proposed a multi-tiered fountain topped by the figure of an Indian chief, but local citizens objected to celebrating a recently feared and despised enemy.  So MacMonnies offered instead a sculpture of the all-around frontiersman Kit Carson (1809-68), who, to this day, appears in bronze riding a rearing horse at the summit of the Pioneer Monument in downtown Denver.

Had they been consulted, Native Americans might have demurred.  During the Civil War, Carson was assigned by the Union Army to do something about the Navajo, whose defense of their tribal lands against incursions by settlers had become a problem.  In the winter of 1864, Carson rounded up 8,500 Navajo men, women and children and forced them to journey on foot some 300 miles in what came to be known as the Long Walk.  Hundreds died along the way;  many more succumbed to terrible conditions at a poorly conceived and operated reservation at Bosque Redondo in New Mexico Territory.

A small version of the Carson sculpture, produced by MacMonnies in 1915 at the time when bronze statuettes were all the rage in America, now can be seen in "The American West in Bronze, 1850-1925", a spiritually troubling exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The wall label characterizes Carson only as a "legendary, if controversial figure".  It notes, too, that Theodore Roosevelt bought this piece for himself in 1915 and displayed it in his Long Island home along with Frederic Remington's "The Bronco Buster" which Roosevelt's fellow Rough Riders gave him when the group disbanded in 1898.

Billed in the catalog as "the first full-scale exhibition to explore the aesthetic and cultural impulses behind the creation of statuettes with American Western themes," the show presents 65 mostly pedestal-scale sculptures by 28 artists.  It's organized according to three themes:  Indians, wild animals and cowboys.

It's less exciting than it sounds.  Nearly everything here is in a mode of three-dimensional illustrative realism.  Done up in bronze, such work assumes a high-art patina as if it belonged to a continuous tradition dating to the European Renaissance.  What it really is is kitsch:  pseudohigh art for a philistine clientele that was generally wealthy, East Coast, urban and male.  

Artists like MacMonnies capitalized on the popularity of their public monuments by issuing small copies in editions of hundreds and having posh gallery exhibitions in New York.  Most of the artists represented in this show had some academic training, and their works are visibly skillful.  But hardly anything is formally or technically startling, and there's a monotonous sameness to the fictionalized realism running throughout. (The American Modernist Paul Manship's two-part 1914 sculpture of a kneeling Indian hunter and the anteloope he just shot with his arrow is refreshingly exceptional for its translation of overfamiliar motifs into an elegant, Art Deco- like choreography.)

A nostalgic, regretful mood suffuses the show.  By the time most of the work was made--the late 19th and early 20th centuries--the West was no longer what it had been.  The Indians had been subdued, the buffalo had been hunted nearly to extinction, and the broncobusting, six-gun-slinging cowboy was preparing for his Hollywood close-up.  All the sculptures seem sad about that.

But what exactly are they mourning?  One of the most poignant expressions of grief is James Earle Fraser's "End of the Trail"  -  the famous image of an exhausted brave on his tired horse, both man and beast hunched against a cold wind blowing at their backs.  Ostensibily, this is an elegy for a noble people on the brink of oblivion.  As the art historian Carol Clark notes in her catalog essay  "Indians on the Mantel and in the Park,"  a critic writing in 1920 said it indicated "the national stupidity that has greedily and cruelly destroyed a race of people possessing imagination, integrity, fidelity and nobility."

But there's nothing in Fraser's sculpture or anything else in the exhibition that overtly criticizes what white, Euro-American civilization did and was doing to the native people, animals and plants of North America.  It's as if the devastation of the West were an inevitable natural disaster rather than the product of vicious programs and policies of business and government.

Another interpretation might see in Fraser's sculpture a white culture grieving for itself, for the loss of its own inner wildness of soul.  The Indians, cowboys, bears and buffalo are metaphors for psychological energies and possibilities that modern civilization must keep in check if people are to function properly in its market-based system.  The apparatus of art production, sales and distribution from which such artworks issue is precisely the kind of thing that kills wildness.

As organized by  Thayer Tulles, a curator of American paintings and sculptures at the Met, and Thomas Brent Smith, director of the Petrie Institute of Western American Art at the Denver Art Museum, the exhibition goes light on interpretation.  It's usually a good thing to let the art speak for itself, but here it's troubling, because it underplays a real-world history of appalling violence and evil, to which the sculptures appear oblivious .

Ms. Clark's essay includes a photograph of the Indian chief Big Foot lying dead in the snow after the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890.  There's nothing glamorous about that depressing picture, unlike the idealizing sculpture that Ms. Clark compares it to, "FallenWarrior (Death of the Chief)" by Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor behind Mount Rushmore.  In "Warrior", made about a year after the massacre, a dying Indian displays his svelte, nearly naked physique as he reaches up to grasp the blanket on his standing horse.  The descrepancy between grim reality and sexy fantasy is this exhibition's untold story.

Art Review   Ken Johnson  New York Times Weekend Arts   edition  12-20-13

 

 

340

Not much of a day for something to Show.  i spent time this morning watching the Utubes for the Mustang Camp.  then i went to work.  i was in some kind of day dream from watching the Utubes.

came home.  cleared the Albatros for a  half ton Alfalfa delivery.   then, had some small time to Kantha.

 

the left is this evening.   the right is yesterday.  there is a difference.  the left is uneven.  very.  i noticed and undid it all.  began again.  and still,  it is uneven.   but the second time around,  i realized that i prefer it Uneven.   hmmmm.  

 

and What IS IT that i am seeing about this taming of horses to human beings?  for me, this really is about the Goats.  but i'm thinking Goats are similar to wildborn Mustangs.   How?.   thinking.  and what i see when i watch this woman working with them is the slow slow slowness.   the repetativeness.  the reliability of Her.   What does this mean to me?    and somehow it all makes me teary.  How things take time.  and being The Same...yourself...being the same self.  the trustworthy self.  over and over and over.  for as long as it takes.

 

ADD

and i forgot this.  but need to note.  (Journal)  i spent some time on the way back from the Old Folks Home and Alz B  at the Thrift shop.  I FORCED self to go through all the pants...3/4 levi's/jeans  on the women's pants table.  OVERwhelming endeavor.  but i have only a single pair of pants.  this doesn't work out so well with no washing machine.    out of the MANY,  i brought home 2 possibilities.  only one will work.  it seems that all pants now are either so skinny they are stupid or so baggy they are also stupid.  BUT.  one more.  i had been even considering going to the only clothing store in town, a Western Wear store and buying a NEW!!!!!  pair.  but how long would it take till they felt OK....forever...so...it's February.  2 more months till skirt/jumper days.  maybe this one will help me make it through...............................

 

 

 

339

so it was a WorkAwayDay that lasted longer than it might have and then it was Goat Things and then

 

the wood guy, Beloved Evan,  brought the second cord of the year....more of the alligator juniper and look how beautifully SIZED it is...so probably very little splitting necessary...tra la.  and

THEN

 

 

in the local newspaper that comes out once weekly and usually just documents local petty crime,  there was THIS!!!   A couple who train the mustangs and burros for the Bureau of Land Management.   This Mustang Adoption Program has been in place for many years as an effort to accomodate wild herds in the state.  Horses can be adopted by anyone with suitable environment for $125.   they are often more than people bargain for and this program works with the Bureau to reduce the incidents of return.   Anyway.  they are Relocated from Norther New Mex to this new place just FOUR MILES from me,  and are open to visitors any Sunday Afternoon.   they presently have  34 wild born mustangs and are expecting 50 additional soon.   they want to encourage local people to volunteer to learn their training techniques and help with the taming of the animals.  So.

if this weren't enough, but then, i read....Patricia, who has a PhD in behavioral sciences and has written the book "How to Train A ______________"  is quoted to say:  " The training technology we use is applicable to all animals"....

so i phone them up.  leave message.  they return call and i have a really great conversation with her about GOATS,  and will go there this next Sunday afternoon.  

then i unloaded the Goat feed from the truck,  started the fire,  ate food and it's the end of this day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

338

one side of the kantha accomplished.  this pic late in the day.  so decided to see what the flash would do ....  usually nothing good, but....

 

 

 

and remember,  it needed to be ok in any direction.   and looking at these,  i think it is.  somehow the flash made it....uhhhh,  flatter?   easier to see almost.  and i think it's ok.

and i think i realize that i am looking for a way to Feel about how things are going, or seem to be going for the Planet,  for humanity,  and that i was unable to feel grounded  once i  "moved" out side of my own Place here,  that there seemed to be such a disconnect...and the last few Cloths have been an effort to find some way to be ok with this disconnect ,  and Just Go anyway.  

i think this one is that effort,  that  movement that i need to translate into Doing.   i hope the Thinking about it becomes clearer as i finish the kantha.  but if it's something that can't be THOUGHT,  then, at least i have an image.  a cloth image.  so..maybe this is a Cloth Thought?

337

just a little stitching,  just some invisible baste.  just enough to see if it can work.   Which is hard, because i really can't articulate what the IT is.  but it's about feelings.  Earth feelings.   

this much for now and i've begun the kantha around the border.   once that's done i can go back InSide and Re View.

 

i had to come back and add this.  It needs to go all ways.  Sun at the Rise,  or Moon.  Vertical or Horizontal...just like this Earth does it, magically, somehow.  i forgot to put this pic because the across the road people are having a PARTY.  the Goats have never experienced a PARTY before.

lots of music, lots of Voices....and just as i was posting the first,  voices outside their fence that i couldn't tell if they were speaking,  LOUDLY,  to    the Goats  or   at   the Goats.  Goats just spoke back....Snowbunny in the lead,  her back covered by Ginger...which surprised me.  Ginger is normally very quiet.  but she was Ready.  Lots of drugs.  Lots of alcohol.  a very uneasy vibration.

i hope they want to go home soon.  a cold Wind is rising.  maybe that will help.   it's been so long here...i'd forgotten how that kind of thing feels.