End Times

Every few days, I read about another major earthquake somewhere in the world, yet I'm not reading anything that says something BIG is happening at the earth's core. Maybe not the core. Maybe the mantle. Seems people would be taking an interest in geology right now, getting out the old schematics and refreshing their memories about all that. Not that it would do any good. But something is going on down there. It is like when your bowels begin to roil, I think. Everything is looking for a new place to lay. As I posted a while back, it is freaky that the length of days has changed and that the poles are shifting. This is not metaphysics, but it has the magnitude of it. Where are the dinosaurs?

But science doesn't move that fast. Nobody is going to speculate without some hard and fast evidence. But I will. I don't need any. All I need is a box to stand upon. End Times. Last Days. I think that will be the series that follows my circus shoot (more on that in a moment). End Times preachers. No, it will be larger than that. I won't limit myself to Christians. If any of you know the Islamic equivalent to the soapbox, let me know. Oh, yea, you can't. There's a disadvantage.

I've had another blow to my fragile creative ego. I saw a woman's work online and sent her a Fan's Note. She was VERY gracious and in sending back a reply. Turns out, she is a creative director in NYC and has offered me advice and more. She is a treasure, truly. I will tell you more when the time is right. But the work she shows me embarrasses my puny talents. She styled a Bellocq-style shoot that is. . . well, I'm crushed. Glad mine became something else.

There is no end to the beatings a fragile ego can take. Oh, wait. Yes there is. End Times. Lest we forget. All your puny talents and desires will go the way of the dinosaurs. Reminds me of a poem by Linda Pastan called "Ethics."

In ethics class so many years ago

our teacher asked this question every fall:

if there were a fire in a museum

which would you save, a Rembrandt painting

or an old woman who hadn't many

years left anyhow? Restless on hard chairs

caring little for pictures or old age

we'd opt one year for life, the next for art

and always half-heartedly. Sometimes

the woman borrowed my grandmother's face

leaving her usual kitchen to wander

some drafty, half imagined museum.

One year, feeling clever, I replied

why not let the woman decide herself?

Linda, the teacher would report, eschews

the burdens of responsibility.

This fall in a real museum I stand

before a real Rembrandt, old woman,

or nearly so, myself. The colors

within this frame are darker than autumn,

darker even than winter--the browns of earth,

though earth's most radiant elements burn

through the canvas. I know now that woman

and painting and season are almost one

and all beyond saving by children.