A rumination on the importance of intent
An Ohio-bleak November day in 1973. Thirty-three degrees. The extended family’s sprawled at the dinner table in the dining room of our English Tudor style home. Ault View Avenue is lined with autumns' naked elms. I’m seven. Uncle Doug’s holding court. His Lucky Strike smolders dangerously close to the waxy veneer of our dining room table. I smell laquer but see no smoke. I swear my mom’ll poke his eye out with a fork if he’s stupid enough to mar the finish. To hell with the bond of blood. To hell with family, nobody fucks with my mom’s furniture. The house may be small but my mom’s got “taste” in spades, and that’s “real” furniture not some particle board crap from Scott Shuptrine. [ In 1850 a formal dinner table was made by real men, from “real” wood, without hardware. Ninety-eight percent oak. Wood screws? Please.]
At the head of the table sits my dad Thomas William Earls Jr, sinuous and boney. A product of the high ball generation. Think Irish Frank Sinatra cross pollinated with a kinetically intellectual Don knots. The "curse of the Irish" struck him hard. He drinks gin and tonic or scotch and water. Never, and I stress never did I see him sully himself with beer. (Too “hillbilly”) Even at Thanksgiving it was straight Brooks Brothers suits with cuffed pants, no break at the shoes. These were the days before upper middle class suburban neighborhoods were littered with postmodern town centers and “Kenwood Collections.” Back in the day, Brooks Brothers did not grace the mall. Nor did they offer Italian cut suits. That shit was cut like a bag, straight English. Oxymoronically, Those suits may have been a uniform but they weren’t about “style.” They were about antistyle. My pop’s suit was the same as his pop’s, and my brothers would be the same as my dad’s. My dad took pride in his appearance. He would work a spitshine to a mirror finish like a prize fighter working the speedbag. Without even a trace of exaggeration, I swear I could see my face in his cordovan tassel loafers. In 73 a spitshine wasn’nt yet a lost art. A spitshine derives it’s depth and mirror like sheen from spit. (and successive layers of; semi transparent wax(shoe polish), applied, dried, buffed, spit upon, buffed again, dried again, spit upon, and buffed over and over in an endless self-referential loop.) When I travel, I Iike to patronize the shoe shine boys at the airport. Now I got tremendous respect for the working man, and I love the way ten bucks makes my shoes look “almost new.” But, “almost new” aint no spitshine! “Back in the day” my dad would kick back. Flick on the tube. Dial in the Big Red Machine and would put a shine on pair of wingtips that lent truth to the adage “the clothes make the man!”
Back to our Story. Uncle Doug sits kitty corner. Uncle Doug was exotic. Sure, he may have been bald but he had a mustache, and the balls to wreck three Corvette Stingrays by the age of twenty-five. He’s a bachelor. He drinks beer. At the tender age of seven, that slightly warm unnaturally yellow, tall glass of Miller®‚ beer perched between his smoldering Lucky Strike stump and my mom’s fork held my fascination like a pitbull on a mailman. Beer... I was spellbound as my uncle Doug held court, took a few tiny grains of salt and let them fall into the glass. He announced “salt mellows the beer.” My face drew dangerously close, my eyes wide. I traced the descending salt grains as they quickly settled on the bottom. Bubbles formed instantly on the grains, clung and rose rapidly. Almost as quickly, the grains disappeared and dissolved, and yet the eternally rising bubbles did not. It was at this moment that I first noticed that the bubbles seemed to form at a constantly moving and imperceptible point roughly one half inch from the bottom of the glass. As the bubbles rose they increased in size, until they burst forth on the foamy surface. My uncle hoisted his glass, quaffed his industrially produced ale, wiped his moustache and broke my hypnotic state.
In the twenty nine years from that moment, my mind has often drifted back to that unbelievably pure image. That warm glass of wheat colored beer shimmers on the horizon of my minds eye, undimmed by the anesthesia of memory. Nay, time has rectified it’s imperfections. The image of that beer is frozen, and has haunted me like the mystery of the sacred cross to a practitioner of the Greek Orthodox faith. The simple image of the bubbles rising in this wheat colored brew seemed to tap into a reality beyond perceptual or intellectual apprehension. I have found that unlocking the mystery of that image has helped me to understand the true nature of my work.
When you trace the bubbles of thought and action down beyond their source, when you chase “the black beast back to its lair,” (apologies to Dave Hickey quoting Faulkner) you arrive at the the Aleph. The beginning, the place where according to Borges “without admixture or confusion, all places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist.” beyond which it is impossible to arrive. And if with courage, you press on, tracing this spiraling path ever downward beyond the beginning, beyond the Aleph. One arrives at the impossibility of that unitary thing “from which words and thoughts return without having attained it” (Taittiriya Upanishad, ch.II, sect. 4,1l.1).
Any work from typography to film, is manifest at that imperceptible point beyond the Aleph, and before thought or action. The die is cast out side the clutch of time, in the moment of intent. The “Quality” of any work of art is determined HERE! Like the bubbles rising slowly in the Miller®‚ beer of our lives, intent gives rise to thought. Thought gives rise to action. Action manifests work. And over time, all of these manifest a life.This bears repeating and subtle modulation. The die is cast in the moment of intent. [editors note: please make the word “in” italic]. As we too slowly rise out of this narrative, a reexamination of the spit shine is now at hand.
My father understood the importance of the aesthetic realm as perceptual vehicle and metaphor, hence his mastery of the spit shine. You may remember, that a spitshine derives it’s depth and mirror like sheen from spit and successive layers of; semi transparent wax(shoe polish), applied, dried, buffed, spit upon, buffed again, dried again, spit upon, and buffed over and over in an endless self-referential loop. As in the spit shine, each piece we undertake is comprised of an accretion, a building up of an infinite and self-referentially endless series of decisions in the present moment. In each of those moments like Siddartha, we find ourselves at a crossroads. And in each of those moments the individual has to weigh and battle an endless list of societal pressures; career goals, financial expectations, time constraints etc... But ultimately it is the unequivocal denial and rejection of these concerns that is paramount. I hesitate to use the term, but it is inescapable.
It is the “Purity”2 of ones intent, that determines the character of ones work and in turn ones' life.
1. These were the days before upper middle class suburban neighborhoods were littered with postmodern town centers and "Kenwood Collections." Back in the day, Brooks Brothers did not grace the mall. Nor did they offer Italian cut suits. That shit was cut like a bag, straight English. Oxymoronically, Those suits may have been a uniform but they weren't about "style." They were about antistyle. My pops' suit was the same as his pops' and my brothers would be the same.
2. "'Purity?' You've got to be kidding me. Talk about a problematic term." - Yea... so?