Note: this is the first of a four part essay I will be publishing in time for Easter. I have told some version of this story and tried to write about it for many years. It is formative to my own practice as an artist and as a person. This is the story of going to New Mexico and encountering an image world from my own religion that felt alive, urgent and still distant.
When I was an adolescent, I didn’t know how to be a human being. I lived until I was 18 in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Born the last of seven with a huge age gap in between generations I was like an analog 3D picture with the red and blue lines misaligned. Blurry and buzzing with unresolved energy. Red was the color through which I saw the world. I held the rage and disappointment of generations of working class, French-Canadian men inside me. The toxins of American maleness, with its fragile, cracked glass edges were baked into my person. From adolescence to my mid-twenties I had energy “too big for the village”. I trampled my way through the days knocking into people inadvertently. There was no guide.
Part of my inheritance was Catholicism. I never had the staying power to be a good Catholic. I look at what now animates my image world and I must admit the early sediment comes from the Catechism and mass. Easter was always a charged time. When I was younger it was easter eggs, chocolate and a little toy. Maybe it was the biological rhythms of the coming spring or some internalization of the mythology of Christianity but as I entered adolescence something prickled under my skin. Easter, not Christmas is the big event of Christianity. The whole mythological pivot is the story of Christ’s persecution, crucifixion and resurrection. It is there where Christ merges with Persephone, with Osiris and all the Pagan deities of underworld and rebirth.
I was a lousy Catholic. I barely passed the test to get my Confirmation. Mass was an extended period of daydreaming waiting for the “Peace be with you” to alert me that mass was almost over. I would perk up when the priest would sermonize about sin. As I was lasciviously eyeing the cheerleaders from nearby schools I would feel the priest’s and God’s disappointment in my perversion. I mostly absorbed the social finger wagging, the judgement and the boredom of long masses. The Catholicism of the seventies in Connecticut did its level best to tamp down all the wild, violent ceremony that is its foundation. There was something about Easter, however, that felt different.
For the Irish poet-philosopher John Moriarty, Easter is the moment where the Christ image goes into the depths and encounters all the deities, all the living energies of the world. During the Tenebrae, the gradual extinguishing of candles leading up to Easter Sunday, Christ travels into the underworld, into absolute darkness. For Moriarty, it is a trip we all must take. “Tenebrae it is called. Tenebrae means darkness. It doesn’t mean ordinary darkness, night darkness. It refers rather to the darkness which, on Good Friday from the sixth to the ninth hour, lay not only upon all things but pervaded them, laying hold of them in their deepest empirical inwardness.” Easter is, for Moriarty, when Christ goes “Grand Canyon deep” and pulls up the earth as Turtle does in the Maidu creation story.
There is so much to resolve from my childhood. Great blockages and reservoirs of doubt still occupy the soul’s catacombs. But I do understand that it can be turned into a distilled potion capable of great healing. I always felt mismatched in my household, like a spare part that didn’t quite fit. I suppose most adolescents feel this. As early as I can remember, earlier than I would have the words to articulate it, I was deeply rooted in mythic imagination. The veneer of my inherited religion reflected away from the depths of its own mythology and obscured its true power. It was in late winter and early spring of my fifteenth year that I found myself plunged into a deep and sudden depression.
I took to wandering around the neighborhood for hours in late winter. I can’t remember if there was a specific event that inaugurated this break. I was broody by temperament, so drifting around in a funk was not a surprise to anyone. This was different though. It was a complete shift that soaked all the way to my bones. It was an opening, a call.
Every night we would eat dinner around the small dinette set. My father would regale us with stories from “the shop” or Bridgeport Machines where he worked as a foreman. My mom sat silently as she heard these stories many times before. It was just me at the table; everyone else moved out. I had just discovered irony and sarcasm. In my adolescent enthusiasm I wielded them with zeal and with no edit. I tried this new mode in every interaction. I remember one night as my mom sat quietly boiling over and finally, exasperated broke open, “Would you please stop!” I had no place to put all of this bubbling ferment.
So much is acutely clear from that time. My bedroom was in the dormer upstairs in our 950 square foot house. Being the youngest had its advantages. Fifteen years earlier, the three tiny bedrooms were occupied by my five oldest siblings. By the time high school came around my brother Mike had just moved out to go to college and I had the upstairs to myself. My sister had recently moved out as well when she got married. My room was a shithole. It was never tidy, constantly full of the detritus of hand me downs and badly cared for toys. My mattress was an original, sagging badly in the center. I had a pair of big, cheap orange headphones through which I would blast music into my head. The Doors were an early obsession.
I think I learned to love poetry from Jim Morrison. I know it's easy to mock from the distance of adulthood but he literally was a door for me. So much of what he said and how he performed made sense. On the spoken word album An American Prayer, he has a line that appears elsewhere in other Doors songs, “Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding to death, ghosts crowd a child’s fragile eggshell mind.” As I mentioned earlier, I never left New England at this point. I didn’t really know what landscape he was referring to, I didn’t really know who Indians were other than the most garish, cartoonish image portrayed in mainstream media. I find a lot wanting in the Doors at this point in my life, but I have to credit that obsession as an essential signpost.
So, this was the context. It was early spring or late winter just before Easter. I may have already received the ashes from Ash Wednesday and picked some largely ceremonial thing to give up for Lent. It was still cold outside, the New England streets damp with the last of the brown dirty snow melted. Every night after drying the dinner dishes; my patient mother listening to me jabber on about this or that, I would walk outside. I walked the neighborhood with no particular goal. I walked and walked for a couple of hours. The sky at night had a reddish glow. This fact is emblazoned in my memory. The magenta suffused sky, the glooming evening. This was not a postcard sunset of salmon pink. It was more the glow of a distant fire. Red skies at night.
My main preoccupation as I walked was the nature of God. I could not square what I had been taught up to that point with what I was experiencing. Because I was experiencing an acute vividness. An electric current. A deep awareness that I was connected to a filament that hummed with energy. It was not joyous. It was a weight: a lead blanket that lay over me in bed, a buzz in my head during the day. It was a goad that sent me wandering the neighborhood at night. All of this was lit by that carmine sky. This state lasted for a month. It may simply have been a bout of depression. At that time and where I grew up, psychology was not really something to be relied on or trusted. I believe it was a call to initiation to someone who had no cultural images to construct a positive path through the darkness.
By the end of the month of night walking, I came to the conclusion that God created the universe but now receded. Everything was just moving along based on natural laws he put into place. The deity is impersonal I surmised. Later that year in school, I learned that I had just come up with a philosophy already in play in eighteenth century France. This philosophy is the source of many of the troublesome worldviews that regard the world as full of dead objects. The inert universe I thought I saw, I perceived because of the opposite idea. The world is alive and connected. Deep down I knew that the world has a song.
In another time or culture, this would have been when I was taken into some kind of initiation. I was having a prophetic experience. My neighborhood in Bridgeport was very mundane. Built in the nineteen thirties, all the houses were small, modest and working class. There was nothing to suggest that a crack in the surface of the universe opened. Who’s got the time? It was a neighborhood of firefighters, cops, machinists and small shop owners. Yet, for me, it had. I walked through that crack and returned eventually to the daily drudgery of high school. I moved through my life over the next few years seeing through a red lens of rage. A vibration inside my body and soul that made me feel too big for the world physically but too small in importance. I knocked over a lot of tables with my stumbling.
Finally I went to art school at The Hartford Art School. Thinking I had broken the orbit of my hometown I dove into art school. Like Parzival wearing the unearned Red Knight’s armor, I galumphed and tripped and stumbled through my first year. However, a few significant events happened that were necessary for my trajectory. Pete McLean taught 3D Design. For some reason he assigned Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown to us. I’m sure I was an uneven student but that book woke me up. Suddenly I had a full, factual connection to the Indians in Jim Morrison’s line and I was given a richer history than any I received through school. Finally, despite the problems with the book (it treats Indigenous nations as gone, tragic and only as victims) it opened my eyes to a fuller and darker US history.
At the same time I was introduced to Joseph Campbell through the Bill Moyers special, The Power of Myth. It aired the year I graduated high school. Like everyone at that time, Joseph Campbell electrified me. It gave shape to the protean mythic sensibility I always had. It gave a shape to my image making. I remember several classes where the rolling AV cart would come in and the clunky VHS tape slipped in to the player. I bought the accompanying book and then I was on my way.
I had several side jobs to support myself while I was at school. One was working a booth at a medical building parking garage. It was dull work but it paid without being taxing. There was a tiny television set in the booth. One shift, I was working late. I had PBS on. I wasn’t really paying attention. I looked up and saw a program about bears. There was a sudden sense that I was being called to pay attention, that Bear was calling me. Later, I was browsing books at the local queer book shop and on the front table was a book called The Sacred Paw by Barry Sanders and Paul Shepard. Combined with all the intel I was receiving from the universe I found a path.
I had a very rocky career at the Hartford School. I left for a while after flunking out, joined the Marines, got kicked out and returned to art school. I discovered ceramics quite by accident while there. My mentors John Rohlfing and Walter Hall gave me a solid base in the medium. However, I was still that raw nerve, the frayed live wire. In the middle of the fall semester I decided I had to leave. I bought a train ticket to Albuquerque where two friends were living. I gave away all my stuff (I’m still sad about the records, comics and motorcycle jacket). With my bike, a red metal toolbox, a copy of DT Suzuki’s Introduction to Zen Buddhism and Gary Snyder’s The Back Country, I went to New Mexico. At 21, I was still a ten year old kid who “runs away” with a stick and kerchief like a cartoon hobo.
After telling this story recently, a friend asked if I might have ADHD. Maybe. As I said earlier that wasn’t a toolkit available to me. But I do think there is something bigger at work. I needed to do something drastic to break my cycle. I needed something irrational to find the path I needed to be on. Otherwise I would have been circling around New England. If I could go back to my younger self and tell him to do things a little more judiciously I would. But this is the story and how it rolled out. I arrived in Albuquerque with a couple hundred dollars. Before any adventure could start, I had to earn a living. So back to waiting tables and bartending. The next opening came after a few months when I met Jicarilla-apache potter Felipe Ortega. He hired me to work with him in La Madera. It is there where my Tenebrae continued.